Earthdata Forum

Hello,
I am interested in looking at past remote sensing images of a lake in South Florida and find out the time period when algal bloom triggered in the lake. Which sensor will be best suited for this work and which algorithm will yield the best result for an inland water system. Please guide me.

Thank you,
Mohd Manzar
Florida International University

It depends on the lake you are interested in.  Most South Florida lakes will be too small
to monitor with the standard ocean color sensors like MODIS and VIIRS.  Lake Okeechobee
is large enough, but you may need to develop your own bloom-detection algorithm because
that lake does not meet all the assumptions of the standard global ocean-color algorithms.

Smaller Lakes are probably better addressed with missions like Landsat and Sentinel-2,
but those missions have longer revisit times and are more likely to experience sun-glint
during the boreal spring/summer/fall.  Here are a few Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 images
to give an idea of spatial coverage for different Florida Lakes.
ftp://samoa.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/norman/Landsat8/LC8015042-0432016024LGN00_B432.SouthFlorida.png
ftp://samoa.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/norman/Landsat8/LC80150412016184LGN00_B432.LakeOkeechobee.png
ftp://samoa.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/norman/Landsat8/LC80170412017024LGN00_B432.TampaBay.png
ftp://samoa.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/norman/Sentinel2/S2A20161120T210825.LakeApopka.png

You may wish to contact someone at the CyAN Project
(https://www.epa.gov/water-research/cyanobacteria-assessment-network-cyan)
which has used MERIS and other data sets to track freshwater algal blooms.

Regards,
Norman