Analysing the Changes in Water Quality of River Ganga Passing Through Urban Cities with Remote Sensing and GIS Support

Abstract

River Ganga in India has tremendous self-purification capacity due to its dynamic, turbulent and meandering characteristics. In addition due to the presence of anti-bacterial agents such as Bacteriophages virus killing bacteria and its medicinal properties, the refinement capacity increases. In the present work, water quality samples of river Ganga at Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi, Patna and Bhagalpur were collected and analysed for the years 2017-2019 to assess the change in water quality of the river Ganga in terms of total suspended solids (TSS) and turbidity through remote sensing data and ground observations. The change in spectral reflectance of water along the river in the visible region has been analysed using the Landsat-8 multispectral remote sensing data and water quality samples have been collected from all the sites on the date of pass of Landsat-8 satellite. The results obtained shows that the satellite based remote sensing approach can be effectively used to make qualitative and quantitative estimates of total suspended solids and turbidity using nonlinear equations with high accuracy, even in the absence of field observations.