Monitoring the river plume induced by heavy rainfall events in large, shallow, Lake Taihu.pdf

Remote Sensing of Environment 173 (2016) 109–121 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Remote Sensing of Environment j ourna l homepage: www.e lsev ie r .com/ locate / rseMonitoring the river plume induced by heavy rainfall events in large, shallow, Lake Taihu using MODIS 250 m imageryYunlin Zhang a,?, Kun Shi a, Yongqiang Zhou a,b, Xiaohan Liu a,b, Boqiang Qin a a Taihu Laboratory for Lake Ecosystem Research, State Key Laboratory of Lake Science and Environment, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China b University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China? Corresponding author at: Yunlin Zhang, Nanjing Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 73 East Beijing E-mail address: ylzhang@ (Y. Zhang). /10.1016/j.rse.2015.11.020 0034-4257/? 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.a b s t r a c ta r t i c l e i n f oArticle history: Received 10 June 2015 Received in revised form 11 September 2015 Accepted 13 November 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Heavy rainfall event Lake Taihu MODIS River plume Total suspended matterKnowledge of stormwater river plume dynamics is important for themanagement of lake water quality because river discharge associated with rainstorms can be a major source of pollutants for lake waters. Total suspended matter (TSM) derived from the discharge of sediment-laden rivers is highly variable over a wide range of time and space scales. In the present study, the first use of remote sensing to monitor the river TSM plume was con- ducted to investigate the effects of heavy rainfall events on Lake Taihu by the largest inflowing river (Tiaoxi River) based on a calibrated and validated model using daily 250 m MODIS imagery in band 1 (620–670 nm). From 2004 to 2013, 48 MODIS images of 20 heavy rainfall events were obtained, showing that the area of the TSM plume significantly increased in the waters adjacent to the inflowing river, reflecting runoff input. The TSM concentration of the river plume