Assessing the efficacy of Landsat-8 OLI imagery derived models for remotely estimating chlorophyll- a concentration in the Upper Ganga River, India

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Abstract
Chlorophyll-a (chl-a) serves as an indicator of productivity in surface water. Estimating chl-a concentration is pivotal for monitoring and subsequent conservation of surface water quality. Artificial neural network (ANN) based models were validated and tested for their efficacy against various regression models to determine the chl-a concentration in the Upper Ganga river. Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) surface reflectance (SR) imagery for May and October along with in-situ data over a period of 2 years (2016–2017) was used to develop and validated models. Regression model performance was acceptable with a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.57, 0.63, 0.66 and 0.68 for linear, exponential, logarithmic and power model, respectively. However, there was a significant improvement in the efficacy of chl-a determination using ANN model performance having a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.52 µg l–1 and R2 = 0.97 in comparison to the best-performing regression model (power) with RMSE = 9.86 µg l–1 and R2 = 0.68. ANN exhibited comparatively more precise spatial and seasonal variability with mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.26 µg l–1 as compared to the best regression model (power) MAE = 7.98 µg l–1 suggesting the applicability of ANN for large-scale spatial and temporal monitoring river stretches using Landsat-8 OLI SR images.

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