Total Suspended Solids Modelling Using Satellite Technology

An investigation has been conducted to test the feasibility of using Tiungsat-1 satellite data for modelling total suspended solids (rSS) in the coastal waters of Penang. The proposed algorithm is based on the reflectance model that is a function of the inherent optical properties of water, which can be related to its constituent s concentrations. Sea-truth data sets available in our archive were usedfor reference. Four Landsat TM satellites scenes coincided with the dates of the sea-truth data werecombined together for algorithm calibration. A simple normalization technique was carried out in this study for radiometric correction. Only two bands of satellite data were used in this study. They are red and green. The digital numbers corresponding to the seatruth locations were extracted for calibration of several tested algorithms. The values of the correlation coefficient (R) and root-mean-square deviation (RMS), indicated the superiority of the proposed algorithm. The Tiungsat scene was normalized radiometrically to the reference Landsat TM scene. A TSS map based on Tiungsat imagewas then generated using the calibrated algorithm. A geocode TSS map was produced after geometric correction was performed using the nearest neighbour technique. Filtering was performed on the generated map to remove random noise and colour-coded for visual interpretation. This study indicates that Tiungsat-l data can be used for modelling TSS with promising and high accuracy results.