Remote sensing of water quality is initiated as an additional part of the on going activities of the EAGLE2006 project.
Within this context intensive in-situ and airborne measurements campaigns were carried out over the Wolderwijd and
Veluwemeer natural waters. However, in-situ measurements and image acquisitions were not simultaneous. This poses
some constraints on validating air/space-borne remote sensing products of water quality. Nevertheless, the detailed insitu
measurements and hydro-optical model simulations provide a bench mark for validating remote sensing products.
That is realized through developing a stochastic technique to quantify the uncertainties on the retrieved aquatic inherent
optical properties (IOP).
The output of the proposed technique is applied to validate remote sensing products of water quality. In this processing
phase, simulations of the radiative transfer in the coupled atmosphere-water system are performed to generate spectra
at-sensor-level. The upper and the lower boundaries of perturbations, around each recorded spectrum, are then modelled
as function of residuals between simulated and measured spectra. The perturbations are parameterized as a function of
model approximations/inversion, sensor-noise and atmospheric residual signal. All error sources are treated as being of
stochastic nature. Three scenarios are considered: spectrally correlated (i.e. wavelength dependent) perturbations,
spectrally uncorrelated perturbations and a mixed scenario of the previous two with equal probability of occurrence.
Uncertainties on the retrieved IOP are quantified with the relative contribution of each perturbation component to the
total error budget of the IOP.
This technique can be used to validate earth observation products of water quality in remote areas where few or no in–
situ measurements are available
