Can chlorophyll-a in meso-oligotrophic shallow waters be estimated using statistical approaches and empirical models from MODIS imagery?

ABSTRACT Accurate estimation of chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentration in inland waters through remote-sensing techniques is complicated by local differences in the optical properties of water. In this study, we applied multiple linear regression (MLR), artificial neural network (ANN), nonparametric multiplicative regression (NPMR) and four models (Appel, Kahru, FAI and O14a) to estimate the Chl -a concentration from combinations of spectral bands from the MODIS sensor. The MLR, NPMR and ANN models were calibrated and validated using in-situ Chl -a measurements. The results showed that a simple and efficient model, developed and validated through multiple linear regression analysis, offered advantages (i.e., better performance and fewer input variables) in comparison with ANN, NPMR and four models (Appel, Kahru, FAI and O14a). In addition, we observed that in a large shallow subtropical lake, where the wind and hydrodynamics are essential factors in the spatial heterogeneity (Chl-a distribution), the MLR model adjusted using the specific point dataset, performed better than using the total dataset, which suggest that would not be appropriate to generalize a single model to estimate Chl-a in these large shallow lakes from total datasets. Our approach is a useful tool to estimate Chl -a concentration in meso-oligotrophic shallow waters and corroborates the spatial heterogeneity in these ecosystems.