Spatiotemporal variation in the water quality of Vembanad Lake, Kerala, India: a remote sensing approach

Abstract

Water quality is one of the essential parameters of environmental monitoring; even a slight variation in its characteristics may significantly influence the ecosystem. The water quality of Vembanad Lake is affected by anthropogenic effects such as industrial effluents and tourism. The optical parameters representing water quality, such as diffuse attenuation (K<inf>d</inf>), turbidity, suspended particulate matter (SPM), and chlorophyll-a (Chl-a), are considered in this study to evaluate the water quality of Vembanad Lake, Kerala, India. As this lake is regarded as of ecological importance by the Ramsar Convention and has faced severe concerns over recent years, there was a substantial change in the water quality during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. This research is aimed at examining the change in water quality using optical data from Sentinel-2 satellites in the ACOLITE processing software from 2016 to 2021. The analyses showed a 2.5% decrease in the values of K<inf>d</inf>, whereas SPM and turbidity show a reduction of about 4.3% from the year 2016 to 2021. The flood and the COVID lockdown had an impact on the improvement in the quality of water from 2018 to 2021. The findings indicated that the reduction in industrial activities and tourism had a more significant effect on the improvement in the water quality of the lake. There was no substantial change in the Chl-a until 2020, whereas an average decrease of 12% in Chl-a values was observed throughout 2021. This decrease can be attributed to the reduction in the lake’s hydrological residence time (HRT). Thus, these findings will be a valuable reference to help the government and non-government organizations (NGO) during strategic planning. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.