When Water Monitoring Gets Big

Abstract

The increasing access to time series of data from satellite imagery, as well as the improvement of spaceborne sensors, offer today considerable opportunities to complete and consolidate the monitoring of parameters targeted by the Water Framework Directive, such as water temperature, transparency, chlorophyll-a concentration or tidal range, on water bodies. This article provides an overview of the French R&D progress concerning the characterization of these different parameters from space, through the prism of the activities of the THEIA Pole's Scientific Expertise Centers dedicated to spatial data on water. While for temperature, time series are now in production on the national territory, performance tests must still be conducted for transparency and chlorophyll-a products, and the prototyping phase has just been launched for tidal range. Monitoring will undoubtedly gain momentum in the near future, allowing to follow even more efficiently the trajectories of lake ecosystems in response to global changes and to the different measurement programs. It therefore seems essential to prepare now to integrate this new type of information, richer in time and space, into the assessment process.