Starlab and the Barcelona City Council use satellite imagery to monitor sea water quality
The Barcelona City Council has launched a service to monitor the water quality of the city beaches through satellite imagery.
The service determines water quality from satellite images that reflect parameters such as the concentration of chlorophyll (key index for determining water quality on the coast), suspended particles (both organic and inorganic, responsible for cloudy water) and transparency (related to the penetration of sunlight, that affects the biological regeneration).
The images used to obtain these indicators come from Envisat (Environmental Satellite), an Earth Observation satellite built by the European Space Agency (ESA) to provide additional observational parameters to improve environmental studies. These images are then processed using algorithms developed by Starlab's Earth Observation scientists to determine the parameters that indicate water quality
