A Comparison of Non-Contact Methods for Measuring Turbidity in the Colorado River

Monitoring suspended-sediment concentration (SSC) is essential to better understand how sediment transport could adversely affect water availability for human communities and ecosystems. Aquatic remote sensing methods are increasingly utilized to estimate SSC and turbidity in rivers; however, an evaluation of their quantitative performance is limited. This study evaluates the performance of three multispectral sensors, which vary in resolution and ease of deployment, to estimate turbidity in the Colorado River: the Multispectral Instrument (MSI) on board the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite, an industrial-grade 10-band dual camera system mounted on a cable car, and a consumer-grade 6-band dual camera system positioned on the riverbank. We use multivariate linear regression to compare in situ turbidity measurements with concurrent spectral reflectance data from each sensor. Models for all three sensors selected similar spectral information and resulted in mean errors