MODULE 7: AIR QUALITY, WATER POLLUTION AND

ECOSYSTEM HEALTH MONITORING

Lecturer: Thomas Heege & Jurgen Everaerts

Webinar speakers: Thomas Heege & Jurgen Everaerts
Duration: 3 hours (1h30 e-learning + 1h30 webinar)

OBJECTIVE WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

This module will provide you with an At the end of this module, you should be
overview of how Copernicus can be able to:
used for monitoring pollution and
• Understand how Earth Observation
ecosystems.
data can be used to measure the
amount of chlorophyll in water bodies;
• Identify how to map and monitor water
quality;
ADVICE • Know how to use the satellite
information capabilities for
Please feel free to join us on the environmental coastal surveys,
forum to stay updated on the bathymetry data and water quality
course, interact with the speakers monitoring services; and
and ask any question you may • Understand which kind of water
have. You can find it here: quality measurements are available as
operational service from different
[Link] satellites, and how to access such data.
/forum/[Link]?id=568

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 VITO: using Copernicus data to measure chlorophyll level in
freshwater bodies
ACTIVITIES SUPPORTING MATERIAL

• Video: “Introduction to VITO” • Video transcript in Appendix A

with Jurgen Everaerts” 6m30s

Water management: mapping and monitoring water quality

ACTIVITIES SUPPORTING MATERIAL

• Video: “Introduction on remote Blogs:

sensing for water quality
A vegetation satellite for coastal
monitoring” 1m47s
turbidity monitoring?

• Reading: blog articles on Keeping an “eye” on our European

VITO’s website 30m00s
waters
Sentinel-2 to support dredging
• Quiz: “Water management” 15m00s activities
Drones and dredging! Is there a
match?

OPTIONAL ACTIVITY

• Video: VITO Remote Sensing Video: VITO Remote Sensing

webinar: mapEO water drone- webinar: mapEO water drone-based
based water monitoring 60m00s
water monitoring
60m00s

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 EOMAP: coastal zones and wetland management

ACTIVITIES SUPPORTING MATERIAL

• Reading: “Introduction to EOMAP” • Video transcript in Appendix B

with Thomas Heege 9m50s

Water quality measurements from space

ACTIVITIES SUPPORTING MATERIAL

• Reading: UNESCO Training • Reading: UNESCO Training

Handbook 15m00s Handbook

• Quiz: “Water quality

measurement” 10m00s

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APPENDIX A: “INTRODUCTION TO VITO” WITH JURGEN EVERAERTS
[TRANSCRIPT]

The Flemish Environment Agency is responsible for monitoring the water quality of all water
bodies in Flanders. They do so by taking water samples and analysing those in the lab. This is a
laborious and costly activity. So, for many freshwater bodies, there are just a few samples taken
every year. However, we have seen some unusually warm summers in the past few years.
Warm stagnant water, combined with high nutrient concentrations, creates the circumstances
for algal blooms in surface water. Some swimming areas were closed due to floating algal
blooms. These pose health problems for the swimmers and fishers, because swallowing it might
cause diarrhoea and vomiting. Breathing in the water droplets may cause respiratory problems
or other allergic reactions.

Now, think about all the privately owned small ponds that are not monitored at all!

At the same time, we knew we could derive the concentration of Chlorophyll in the water from
space. Chlorophyll is produced by algae, and so it is an indicator for algal blooms: if you detect
the first, you can assume the second will follow (if the circumstances are favourable). We do
this by looking at the water in different colours. The advent of the two Sentinel-2 satellites was
a key to creating the service I will describe in a minute. Having data that is updated every few
days means that we can inspect every water body that is larger than 10 by 10 m a few times
per month. Why not more? There are a lot of clouds, and we cannot see through them.

So, we created maps of Chlorophyll concentration, as you can see here. You can see the colour
legend on the right. Now, there’s two things to think about:

Compared to the sampling of the Environment Agency, we show the distribution of Chlorophyll:
it’s not the same everywhere, which means that the algae are not distributed in a uniform way.

The sampling point isn’t necessarily in the best location to detect excessive Chlorophyll
concentrations.

So, the prototype was there. Now, it was time to see how we could turn that into something
useful. We were fortunate to be running an EU Horizon 2020 project that was aimed at putting
research results into a commercial service, and we felt that this application was worth a try.

Here’s what we did: first, we set up a satellite data processing workflow, so that it would run
whenever a new data take from the overpassing satellite came in. Automating this part of the
processing is a key to reducing cost and uncertainty.

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This was only possible because the Belgian Federal Space Policy Office had established the
Terrascope platform, which offers access to Sentinel-data next to cloud processing capacity.

Then, we teamed up with a company that would make a user-friendly user interface for our
service.

As researchers, we’re not so good at putting our results across to the public! We used the
Environment Agency’s structure and naming conventions for the water bodies, and we
integrated their sampling results. This would make the app feel “familiar”. We also put in the
legal concentration limits for the different water bodies, to make the results easy to understand.

With that, we went to the Environment Agency. Keep in mind that they were NOT looking for
a better solution: they were quite satisfied with their current process: taking samples and
analysing them in the lab. But they have an open mind, so they were willing to listen!

So, we showed them the app.

First, they realised that we were offering something that they were unable to do themselves:
to determine the concentration distribution of Chlorophyll.

Secondly, they saw that things change more rapidly than they could hope to detect from their
sampling protocol.

And finally, they understood that the concentration from the sampling location, the location
that the field engineer chooses, isn’t necessarily representative of the chlorophyll concentration
for the whole water body.

Now we had their attention!

At this point, I would like to say: “they went out of their way to get our application working for
them 24/7”. But that is not how it works. There was no budget foreseen for this kind of activity!
There was also no legal basis: the current way of working is accepted; replacing it with an
innovative approach is not easily done. And the app would be used in addition to the current
process, so it would increase spending!

So, they were not going to be able to pay for the service until the next budget was decided.
This would take several months, and we were afraid that by then, they would not be interested
anymore. So, we decided to invest some time to keep their attention: during the past dry and
hot summer, we processed the Sentinel-2 data over Flanders, and sent them an alert whenever
we saw elevated concentrations of chlorophyll, via e-mail.

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Why did we do this? For 4 reasons:

First, to show the Environment Agency we were keen on providing the service; to get feedback
from them; to make them see the value of the service, but in a way that was (clearly) suboptimal
- they would not want to continue in this way (neither did we, for that matter); and finally, to
motivate them to put the money for the service in the budget.

Now, how did that work out?

Well, they did provide feedback, by taking samples at the locations we were indicating and
confirming our measurements. And, in the feedback, they expressed their interest. But of
course, the question remains: is there a budget for our service yet? Well, YES THERE IS! The
Environment Agency has secured a small budget to set up a near-real time service, which will
go into operation by April this year. And we are also thinking about involving other customers!

Elevated Chlorophyll concentrations lead to algal blooms, and these are a health hazard. So, we
will approach the Health Ministry as well as selected cities with a lot of small private ponds.
We’ve successfully completed a survey of all Irish lakes for the Irish Environment Agency, and
this has helped the Flemish Environment Agency to decide on using the service.

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APPENDIX B: “INTRODUCTION TO EOMAP” WITH THOMAS HEEGE
[TRANSCRIPT]

Coastal areas and inland water resources are of increasing importance nowadays. The world
economic forum assigns water related topics (water crisis, climate changes) with the highest
related and ranked risks, with the highest probability and impact, to our society. Data, current
and historic geospatial data, are relevant for management and monitoring in most marine and
water related applications.

What kind of data are really important? Required are physical data: water depth for safe
navigation and survey planning, and environmental data: underwater habitats, data on algae, on
sediment dynamics in rivers, on cyanobacteria blooms in lakes. For energy exploration, water
supply, coastal engineering and of course for environmental directive monitoring in order to
know what is happening also from the authorities’ side and perspectives. Nowadays, satellite
observations increasingly contribute to this demand on data.

Welcome to this video about satellite-based information services for marine and inland water
related applications. My name is Thomas Heege, managing director of EOMAP, a high-tech
service company headquartered in Seefeld, Germany. Our staff have backgrounds in physics,
mathematics, geography, software development and cloud computing. Why so many
disciplines? We will learn this later.

The passion of the EOMAP team around the globe is to provide environmental information for
marine and water related applications. We provide environmental coastal surveys, bathymetry
data and water quality monitoring services for dredging monitoring, for environmental agencies
in different countries. The science-based, affordable, easily accessible information services
using satellite data.

What do our clients, marine and inland water agencies and industries, all have in common?

Whenever it comes to the topic of water and ocean, there is a lack of data. You might imagine
that nowadays there is plenty of data available. The actual situation is very different. For
example: globally 50% of shallow waters are un-surveyed, in many countries more than 70 to
80%. The same applies for many other critical parameters such as seafloor habitats, water
quality in lakes, sediments for hydropower planning. Do you remember the recent hot summer
and maybe your experience of these massive green-blue algae in your bathing lakes? The
evidence of such data was so far only randomly reported by newspapers. However, systematic
area-wide measurements are possible with our satellite data.

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Accordingly, we provided a cyanobacteria survey over 1000 lakes in all Germany for this
extreme hot summer 2018 in Germany, to get any data to evaluate the impact.

Why are this kind of data frequently not available? For traditional measurements on and in
water are very expensive. Extended surveys from ships take a lot of time and are hardly
affordable on a larger scale. Furthermore, the limited spatial and temporal coverage of these
measurements usually is not available so that means it is difficult to provide evidence of many
natural processes which are there.

So, here it is where the value of satellite observations really comes into place. Let me provide
some examples: we provide satellite routine satellite monitoring for compliance monitoring of
the Watersheeds authority in California since 2015. This routine monitoring includes
parameters on phytoplankton, chlorophyll, sediments and cyanobacteria and is already available
in the regular reports of the agency, so you can download these reports.

We are most proud that we deliver actual fit-for-purpose data to many single entities globally:
local water agencies, dredge operators, hydropower operators, that use this kind of data in their
daily operations.

Another example showcases submerged habitat mapping in the Baltic Sea. These data are used
for the water frame directive monitoring of the European Commission, to the environmental
agency of Schleswig Holstein in North Germany. Here we map seagrass, sediments, mussel
banks over the whole coastline. For this survey, we use very high-resolution satellites in 2
meters resolution and Sentinel-2 data – satellite of the European Commission which has a
resolution of 10 meters.

A much larger area of almost 400 000 square km (km2) is covered for the whole survey of the
entire Great Barrier Reef in Australia 2019: for the first time, high-resolution 10m bathymetry
and seafloor data are available to support the full coral reef survey of the Marine Park Authority.

How can we make you better understand the benefits of the new observation technologies,
and the requirements of these technologies? Therefore, training and knowledge transfer is a
key component for us, for users to understand better. Or even to start producing own satellite
services with suitable professional software as we provide for agencies. Over the past years,
EOMAP provides training and capacity building for agencies worldwide so we trained
hydrographers at hydrographic officers in Australia and in Asia. We contributed to new
hydrographic standards. We trained water professionals for example in Brazil to trigger their
own cloud-based satellite measurements system for dams and rivers in all Brazil.

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Every year, we bring together international survey institutions to exchange on the topic of
satellite-derived bathymetry: You may want to have a look at this, there are many interesting
presentations of clients at [Link].

How does it work and why is technology really relevant?

Today, we have many satellite observations that contribute to global measurements and these
are available in different resolutions. More and more satellites are contributing to these
observations, with the Copernicus satellites, as well as significantly contributing to these
observations.

Nowadays, we therefore process big data volumes from satellites such as Sentinel-1, 2, 3,
Landsat, Worldview amongst other satellites. The critical component is suitable data analysis
to get quality data out of these observations. Deriving information from satellites is essentially
the scientific art of accounting many different environmental signal contributions, that impact
on data quality.

You might imagine atmospheric disturbances which all differ from one record to another and
the same with water conditions, there are many parameters to be accounted (for).Our satellite
processing technology accordingly has systematically evolved and validated since more than 20
years. This includes research at the German Aerospace Center for more than 10 years,
collaboration with international experts, space technology, physicists from Russia, Italy,
Germany amongst others. Over the years and driven through the increasing market demand,
EOMAP improved these processes to an operational status since 2006. Validated technology
and global distributor partnerships with relevant companies with satellite operators such as
Digitalglobe are relevant to further develop applications.

Copernicus supports these services by providing good online access to the Sentinel satellite
data. My hope is, that the European Commission will as well foster a diverse market and
innovation driven industry, as proper and client-oriented data are required in most water
related applications.

In summary, satellite-based information services are nowadays available to provide:

Fit-for-purpose, affordable data for many water-related applications. Data are available at a
fraction of the price of traditional surveys.

Online platforms and cloud-supported on-demand generation make(s) it much easier for many
organisations to access and generate their own information.

Finally, technology matters for quality data.

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The exciting ongoing innovation process and digitalisation process continues. As (a) most (well)
established company in this sector, we are very proud that worldwide leading agencies have
trust in our services. High-tech data services provide significant value to support the most
relevant environmental topics of our century.

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