Response of mineral particles in inland lakes to water optical properties and its influence on chlorophyll-a estimation

Abstract

Many chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) remote sensing estimation algorithms have been developed for inland water, and they are proposed always based on some ideal assumptions, which are difficult to meet in complex inland waters. Based on MIE scattering theory, this study calculated the optical properties of mineral particles under different size distribution and refractive index conditions, and the Hydrolight software was employed to simulate remote sensing reflectance in the presence of different mineral particles. The findings indicated that the reflectance is significantly influenced by the slope (j) of particle size distribution function and the imaginary part (n’) of the refractive index, with the real part (n) having a comparatively minor impact. Through both a simulated dataset containing 18,000 entries and an in situ measured dataset encompassing 2183 data from hundreds of lakes worldwide, the sensitivities of band ratio (BR), fluorescence baseline height (FLH), and three-band algorithms (TBA) to mineral particles were explored. It can be found that BR showed the best tolerance to mineral particles, followed by TBA. However, when the ISM concentration is less than 30 g m-3, the influence of CDOM cannot be ignored. Additionally, a dataset of over 400 entries is necessary for developing the BR algorithm to mitigate the incidental errors arising from differences in data magnitude. And if the amount of developing datasets is less than 400 but greater than 200, the TBA algorithm is more likely to obtain more stable accuracy.