Continuous Monitoring of Suspended Particulate Matter in Tropical Inland Waters by High-Frequency, Above-Water Radiometry

Water and sediment discharges can change rapidly, and low-frequency measurement devices might not be sufficient to elucidate existing dynamics. As such, above-water radiometry might enhance monitoring of suspended particulate matter (SPM) dynamics in inland waters. However, it has been barely applied for continuous monitoring, especially under partially cloudy sky conditions. In this study, an in situ, high-frequency (30 s timestep), above-water radiometric dataset, collected over 18 days in a tropical reservoir, is analyzed for the purpose of continuous monitoring of SPM concentration. Different modalities to retrieve reflectance spectra, as well as SPM inversion algorithms, were applied and evaluated. We propose a sequence of processing that achieved an average unsigned percent difference (UPD) of 10.4% during cloudy conditions and 4.6% during clear-sky conditions for Rrs (665 nm), compared to the respective UPD values of 88.23% and 13.17% when using a simple calculation approach. SPM retrieval methods were also evaluated and, depending on the methods used, we show that the coefficient of variation (CV) of the SPM concentration varied from 69.5% down to 2.7% when using a semi-analytical approach. As such, the proposed processing approach is effective at reducing unwanted variability in the resulting SPM concentration assessed from above-water radiometry, and our work paves the way towards the use of this noninvasive technique for high-frequency monitoring of SPM concentrations in streams and lakes.