Title: WaterColours - Computation of climatology and operational high-resolution Chlorophyll-a and Total Suspended Matter products from satellite data
Start date: 1 November 2019
End date: 31 December 2021
Coordinator: Dr. Adam Gauci
WaterColours is a project in which satellite multispectral imagery was used to render, with unprecedented detail, environmental parameters near the Maltese Islands and the Malta Shelf areas including harbours, embayments, and the nearshore open sea areas. Computed at a high resolution, satellite-based climatologies and statistical trends for surface Chlorophyll-a concentrations as well as Total Suspended Matter (TSM), provide very important water quality markers. The latter are in turn be used for estimating essential indices for the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD).
All results are publicly available through an online portal that embeds Machine Learning and image processing techniques. These automatically detect and highlight specific patterns such as harmful blooms or areas with a high TSM content, and provide automated alerts of such events to the Environment Resources Authority (ERA).
The project was financed by the Malta Council for Science and Technology through the Space Research Fund. The University of Malta was represented by Dr Adam Gauci and Prof. Aldo Drago, both from the Oceanography Malta Research Group (ex-Physical Oceanography Research Group) within the Department of Geosciences. This research was carried out in collaboration with Dr Daniele Ciani and Federico Falcini, experts from the Italian National Research Council, Institute of Marine Sciences (CNR-ISMAR).
For more information visit our Project website:
