E-proceedings of the 36th IAHR World Congress

28 June – 3 July, 2015, The Hague, the

Netherlands

Mapping Chlorophyll-a Concentration in Laizhou Bay Using Landsat 8 OLI data

(1) (2)
CHENGKUN ZHANG , MIN HAN
(1)
Faculty of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China,
zhangchengkundon@mail.dlut.edu.cn
(2)
Faculty of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China,
minhan@dlut.edu.cn

ABSTRACT
Recent years, the increasing human activities such as the sea aquaculture, industrial production, contribute to the water
eutrophication of Laizhou Bay, Bohai Sea, China. The concentration of chlorophyll-a, an important index of water quality
status, is often used to describe the extent of eutrophication. With the characteristics of rapidity, cyclicity, large-scale
and low-cost, the technique of remote sensing plays a crucial role in quantitatively monitoring the status of water quality.
MODIS is designed specifically for ocean color, and its Chlorophyll-a inversion models for caseⅠwater were already
widely used. But for its lower spatial resolution, MODIS cannot satisfy the needs of monitoring the water quality in
coastal case Ⅱ waters, such as Laizhou Bay. The shorter cycle, the higher spatial of Landsat 8 OLI data has offered a
great promise for case Ⅱ water status quality monitoring. In this study we utilized two Landsat 8 OLI (Path/Row
120/034) images, for coastal waters around Laizhou city in summer and winter, to map the distribution of chlorophyll-a
concentration. Optimal linear regression models between OLI band combination and concurrent in suit water quality
measurements are developed respectively, and then are used to estimate the chlorophyll-a concentration in different
season. According to the chlorophyll-a concentration distribution map, the water quality of the coastal waters around
Laizhou city is in a certain degree of eutrophication.

Keywords: Chlorophyll-a; turbid productive waters; remote sensing; Landsat 8 OLI data

1. INTRODUCTION
One of the most common ecological problem about coastal water is the anthropogenic eutrophication, which arises from
human activities including the sea aquaculture and sewage discharge. Those activities fertilize water bodies with
nutrients, and often lead to degradation of water quality and destruction of ecosystem at the same time (Novoa et al.,
2012). The most remarkable feature of eutrophication is excessive growth of planktonic alga, which can damage the
species diversity and undermine the ecological stability. The concentration of chlorophyll-a (Chl-a), which can be found
in every phytoplankton species, is one of the standard water quality parameters for the evaluation of the eutrophication
degree and trophic state of inland or coastal water. It is often used to estimate the biomass and productivity of water,
and also helpful in dealing with reasonable management of marine resources and effective protection of marine
environment.
Traditional in suit water quality measurement suffers from spatial and temporal limitations, and seems to be impossible
to describe the spatial distribution of Chl-a concentration in one certain region. Remote sensing techniques have brought
about a new situation in water quality monitoring (Moses et al., 2009). By means of quantitative retrieval methods which
were based on the spectral characteristic, the distribution of Chl-a concentration could be mapped through a remote
sensing image. What’s more, the dynamic changes of eutrophication could be observed by using multi-temporal remote
sensing images. A number of space-borne ocean color sensors have been used for quantitative monitoring of Chl-a
concentration, such as SeaWiFS, MODIS and MERIS, and it always could acquire good precision for its high spectral
resolution (10nm in visible wavelengths) ( Ali et al. 2014; Tilstone et al., 2013). However, the applications of those
sensors were restricted to the open ocean case Ⅰ waters. When comes to the turbid coastal or inland water, they
cannot show the detailed spatial pattern due to the low spatial resolution. In this study, high spatial resolution is more
important, so moderate resolution multispectral imagery, such as Landsat 8 OLI image, seems to be more adaptive to
map the Chl-a concentration distribution. Numerous studies have investigated the application of moderate resolution
multispectral imagery to map the Chl-a concentration distribution of coastal or inland water (Allan et al., 2011; Tebbs et
al., 2013). The general concept is to establish a relationship between the collected spectral data and the Chl-a
concentration, then extrapolate it to the whole study area (Markogianni et al., 2013).
The aim of this study is to map and evaluate Chl-a concentration coastal water around Laizhou city, China, where is
undergoing booming sea aquaculture. By analyzing the relationship between the OLI data and the in suit chl-a
measurement, a suitable algorithm is put forward to estimate and map chl-a concentration in costal water around
Laizhou city. While the study area is small in size, the approach carried out is applicable for any harbor or near-shore
environment where increased spatial information is desired

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28 June – 3 July, 2015, The Hague, the Netherlands

2. STUDY AREA AND SAMPLING SITES

In this work, the study area is set in the coastal water around Laizhou, a county-level city in Yantai Province, China, and
it is located approximately between longitude 119°40′E and 119°60′E, and latitude 37°20′N and 37°30′N, in
the Laizhou Bay, Bohai Sea (Fig.1). In recent years, Laizhou city has witnessed great economic development for its
abundant natural resources, such as gold, Magnesite, granite, and salt, as well as the booming sea aquaculture. Since
1980s, large-scale sea reclamation activities have been taken placed in this city, which was mainly used in aquaculture.
Until 2007, the area of marine aquaculture was reached 5.85 km2. As a result, the production of marine aquaculture
achieved an increase of 32% from 2004 to 2010, which increased the income of residents. However, those activities
have produced great influence on the environment. The overburdened sea aquaculture has destroyed the ocean
dynamics and sediment transport, narrowed down the intertidal area, which result in serious damage to the coastal
wetland ecological balance. What’s more, enormous quantities of aquaculture sewage rich of nutrients and other
pollutants were discharged into the costal water directly, leading to eutrophication of coastal water, as well as the
phenomenon of red tide. Thus, there is an urgent demand to effectively monitor the aquatic environment in the costal
water.

Fig.1 Study area

As is mentioned, chlorophyll-a can reflect the degree of eutrophication. Hence, the concentration of chlorophyll-a is used
as the indicator of water quality. In order to quantify the relationship between remote-sensing reflectance and the
chlorophyll-a concentration of surface water, remote sensing imagery data and in situ water samples with simultaneous
sampling time were collected. Two datasets of water samples were collected on May 24, 2013 and January 1, 2014
respectively, which include 16 samples, as shown in Table 1. The field sampling positions are marked in Fig.1.

Table 1. Sampling datasets and water quality parameters

Sampling Chl-a concentration
Site Latitude(N) longitude(E) Depth(m) PH Salinity
time (ug/L)
S1 37.206 119.81 2013-5-24 2.0 8.26 26.628 2.41
S2 37.233 119.78 2013-5-24 4.0 8.35 26.424 2.65
S3 37.224 119.76 2013-5-24 4.8 8.13 26.510 1.59
Dateset 1
S4 37.204 119.78 2013-5-24 4.5 8.06 26.011 2.24
S5 37.234 119.80 2013-5-24 4.5 8.18 26.338 2.95
S6 37.236 119.81 2013-5-24 4.5 8.12 26.217 2.92
L1 37.429 119.89 2014-1-1 10.0 7.73 27.808 0.47
L2 37.429 119.91 2014-1-1 10.0 7.87 28.136 0.47
L3 37.414 119.89 2014-1-1 9.0 7.85 27.723 0.88
L4 37.414 119.92 2014-1-1 9.0 7.87 28.026 1.12
Dateset 2
L5 37.413 119.93 2014-1-1 7.0 7.82 28.108 0.95
L6 37.398 119.89 2014-1-1 7.5 7.85 27.726 0.92
L7 37.398 119.91 2014-1-1 5.5 7.85 28.160 1.09
L8 37.395 119.93 2014-1-1 3.0 7.81 28.060 1.97

3. MATEIRALS AND METHODS

3.1 Landsat 8 OLI imagery

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 E-proceedings of the 36th IAHR World Congress
28 June – 3 July, 2015, The Hague, the Netherlands

With Landsat 5 retiring in early 2013, leaving Landsat 7 as the only on-orbit Landsat program satellite, Landsat 8,
launched on February 11, 2013, will ensure the continued acquisition and availability of Landsat data utilizing a two-
sensor payload, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal InfraRed Sensor (TIRS). The image data collected
by the OLI has nine spectral bands between 0.433um to 2.300um, consisting of seven multispectral bands, a
Panchromatic band and a cirrus band. With a spatial resolution of 30 meters and a revisiting period of 16 days, the OLI
multispectral bands have more advantage in monitoring the quality of coastal waters. During concurrent in site water
sampling, two cloud-free Landsat 8 OLI scenes of May 22, 2013, January 1, 2014 were used for this study. The imagery
dates used in this work were downloaded freely from the USGS website http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/. Table 2 shows
the properties of the OLI imagery, including spectral range, central wavelength and spatial resolution.

Table 2 properties of the OLI imagery

Channel name Spectral range(um) Central wavelength(um) spatial resolution(m)
OLI1 Coastal 0.433–0.453 0.443 30
OLI2 Blue 0.450–0.515 0.4825 30
OLI3 Green 0.525–0.600 0.5625 30
OLI4 Red 0.630–0.680 0.655 30
OLI5 NIR 0.845–0.885 0.865 30
OLI6 SWIR 1 1.560–1.660 1.610 30
OLI7 SWIR 2 2.100–2.300 2.200 30
OLI8 Pan 0.500–0.680 0.590 15
OLI9 Cirrus 1.360–1.390 1.375 30

3.2 Image Preprocessing

Landsat 8 OLI images of the study area (ID: LC81200342013143LGN01, LC81200342014002LGN00) acquired from the
USGS website are Level 1T processed, meaning that they have undergone systematic terrain calibration and geometric
calibration. However radiometric calibration and atmospheric correction are also required to achieve the purpose of
chlorophyll a concentration retrieval (Fig.2). Those two procedures are conducted by the ENVI software in this work.
After radiometric calibration, the un-calibrated digital numbers (DN) were converted to radiance values through the
formula L  MLQcal  Al , where L is the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) spectral radiance, ML is band specific multiplicative
rescaling factor from the metadata, Al is the band specific additive rescaling factor from the metadata, and then the
dimensionless top-of-atmosphere reflectance TOA can be calculated as:

 L d 2 [1]
TOA 
ESUN  cos s
where L is the spectral radiance at the sensor, d is the Earth-Sun distance in astronomical units, ESUN is the mean
solar exoatmospheric irradiance for each band and cos s is the solar zenith angle in degrees. All those parameters can
be acquired in the header files.
Atmospheric correction was operated taking advantage of the FLAASH module in ENVI after clouds were manually
masked from the images. The sensor altitude and flight time can be found in the header file. In all of the two images,
mid-latitude summer atmospheric model and rural aerosol model were selected to define the water vapour amount and
aerosol type respectively. For aerosol retrieval, the ‘2-band (K-T)’ option was selected, which utilizes Landsat OLI bands
4 (655 nm) and 7 (2200 nm), as well as a nearly constant ratio in reflectance between these bands for identifying the
dark land pixels. Finally, the FLAASH module outputs a bottom-of-atmosphere reflectance value for each pixel and an
average scene visibility and water amount estimate (Tebbs et al., 2013). It is worth mentioning that the image data used
in the following work are all processed by FLAASH atmospheric correction.

Fig. 2 Image processing procedure and comparison

3.3 Coastline extraction

The step of coastline extraction and delineation for water bodies is essential to evaluate water body quality. In remote
sensing imagery processing, the normal differential water index (NDWI) is one of the most successful methods used to
extract coastline from satellite images (Gao, 1996). The values of NDWI are in a range of −1 to 1, and it is defined as
follows:

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28 June – 3 July, 2015, The Hague, the Netherlands

 Green -  NIR [2]

NDWI =
 Green +  NIR
where  Green ,  NIR represent the reflectance of the green band (OLI2), the near-infrared band (OLI5) respectively.
Generally, the values of NDVI that are greater than 0 refer to water body while less than or equal to 0 refer to non-water.
Fig. 3 shows the grayscale map of NDWI and the boundary of water and land. Using ENVI, a mask is made to ignore
the land area when calculate the chlorophyll a concentration.

Fig.3 NDWI grayscale map and the result of coastline extraction

4. RESULTS AND DICUSSION

There exist several models to estimate the Chl-a concentration in turbid water, such as three-band reflectance model
and its modifications (Gitelson et al., 2008; Gitelson st al. 2009; Tian et al., 2014). All those can achieve a good
precision because they are developed based on accurate spectral measurement and the radiation transmission theory.
However, it seems to be difficult to develop complex models due to the broad bandwidth of OLI data. It requires us
develop different methods that are applicable to the OLI data.
In this study, OLI bands and their combinations are employed to estimate chl-a concentration using regression method.
The samples are listed in Table 2, among which samples in Dateset 1 (S1-S6) acquired on May 24, 2013 and Dataset 2
2
(L1-L8) on January 2, 2014. A 3  3 pixel window corresponding to an area of 90  90 m is extracted from the images of
each sampling site, which can bring down the feasible errors or inherent noise in geometrical differences and the
dynamicity of coastal water. The average reflectance of the window is calculated and used in the following model
development.
Previous studies indicated that the middle infrared bands (OLI6 and OLI7) showed low correlations and basically
random relationships with Chl-a concentration in water, which could be due to the low water depth penetration of the
associated wavelengths. We also ignored the near-infrared band (OLI5) for its low reflectance. Accordingly, these bands
were omitted from further consideration, thus the analysis was restricted to OLI bands 1 to 4 and their combinations for
Chl-a estimation. In order to find the best chl-a concentration retrieval algorithm, several simple linear regression
algorithms, e.g. single bands, band ratios, and their combinations were tried on the two datasets respectively. The
results are shown in Table 3 and Table 4.
Table 3. OLI bands 1-5 and their combinations in correlation with Chl-a concentration on May 24, 2013
2 2 2
Variables R Variables R Variables R
OLI1 0.421 OLI2/OLI3 0.094 OLI2-OLI4 0.446
OLI2 0.659 OLI3/OLI1 0.067 (OLI1-OLI3)/OLI2 0.408
OLI3 0.828 OLI4/OLI3 0.227 (OLI2-OLI4)/(OLI2+OLI4) 0.579
OLI4 0.663 OLI4/OLI2 0.610 (OLI4-OLI1)/(OLI4+OLI1) 0.880
OLI1/OLI3 0.059 OLI2/OLI4 0.580

Table 4. OLI bands 1-5 and their combinations in correlation with Chl-a concentration on January 2, 2014
2 2 2
Variables R Variables R Variables R
OLI1 0.815 OLI2/OLI3 0.001 OLI2-OLI4 0.491
OLI2 0.901 OLI3/OLI1 0.719 (OLI1-OLI3)/OLI2 0.440
OLI3 0.815 OLI4/OLI3 0.010 (OLI2-OLI4)/(OLI2+OLI4) 0.003
OLI4 0.624 OLI4/OLI2 0.004 (OLI4-OLI1)/(OLI4+OLI1) 0.487
OLI1/OLI3 0.740 OLI2/OLI4 0.003

For dataset 1, in the case of single band, all of OLI1, OLI2 and OLI3 show good correlation with Chl-a concentration,
among which OLI2 with a determination coefficient of 0.901. However, the bands combinations seem to be less
correlated with the Chl-a concentration. Here, OLI1, OLI2 and OLI3 are used as the variables of a Linear multiple
regression model, as in Eq. [3]. The determination coefficient R2 of Eq. [3] is 0.907 and root-mean-square error (RMSE)
is 0.1416 ug/L.

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Chl-a  0.006  OLI 2  0.013  OLI 3  0.003  OLI 4  0.168 [3]

For dataset 2, in the case of single band, OLI3 shows a good correlation with Chl-a concentration (determination
coefficient R2 =0.828). In the case of bands combinations, (OLI4-OLI1)/(OLI4+OLI1) has the strongest correlation with
Chl-a concentration (R2=0.880), so a simple linear regression model which can approximatively estimate the Chl-a
concentration can be built up as follows:
OLI 4  OLI 1 [4]
Chl-a  17.878   5.636
OLI 4  OLI 1
where Chl-a represents the Chl-a concentration. The predicted Chl-a concentration and the RMSE are calculated.
(shown in Fig. 4).

Chl-a retrieval result on dataset 2

2.5

1.5

Chl-a  0.006  OLI 2  0.013  OLI 3 0.5 OLI 4  OLI 1

Chl-a  17.878   5.636
 0.003  OLI 4  0.168 OLI 4  OLI 1
RMSE= 0.150 ug/L
0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5
Measured(ug/L)
Fig 4 Chl-a concentration retrieval results

Using Eq. [3], the Chl-a distribution of the study area on May 24, 2013 is mapped as Fig. 5a. It can come to the result
that the Chl-a concentration is ranged from 0.02 to 13.6 ug/L. The region near the Yellow River estuary reveals a trend
of eutrophication, which may be caused by the serious pollution of the Yellow River. What more, the coastal water
around Laizhou city has a high level of Chl-a, which is mainly due to the sea aquaculture.
Fig.5b calculated by Eq. [4] shows that the study area on January 2, 2014 has a low level of Chl-a concentration,
because of fallow human activities. What’s more, we also can come to the conclusion that the Chl-a distribution is also
effected by the ocean current. In conclusion, the coastal waters of the study area has a high trend of eutrophication
during summer, while seem to be normal during winter.

a. May 22, 2013 b. January 2, 2014

Fig. 5 Chl-a distribution of the study area

5. CONCLUSIONS
This study established a methodology to estimate and map chl-a concentration by using OLI image by means of
straightforward linear regression. Two different models were established for winter and summer, all of which showed
high accuracy when comparing with the in suit measurement. The distribution map of Chl-a concentration acquired by
the mentioned models could be useful in analyzing the Chl-a source, as well as the transport processes. However, the
results of this study were limited by the small size samples, and more effort should be done in the analysis of spectral
characteristic and the water quality parameters, so comprehensive sampling schemes were planned in future campaigns.

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28 June – 3 July, 2015, The Hague, the Netherlands

As the region we interested in continues to undergo rapid economic development and pressures on aquatic resources
increase, we plan to continue monitoring eutrophication trends of the Laizhou Bay.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB430403), National Natural
Science Foundation of China (No.61374154). The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their
valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of this paper.

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