UAV-based remote sensing of turbidity in coastal environment for regulatory monitoring and assessment

The adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) remote sensing for the regulatory monitoring of turbidity plumes induced by land reclamation operations remains a difficult task. Compared to UAV remote sensing on ambient turbidity in estuaries and rivers, such monitoring of construction-induced turbidity plumes requires significantly higher spatial resolutions and accuracy as well as wider turbidity ranges with nonlinear reflectance. In this study, a pilot-scale deployment of UAV-based hyperspectral sensing is carried out for this objective, with specific new elements developed to overcome the challenges and minimise the uncertainties involved. In particular, Machine learning (ML) models for the turbidity determination were trained by the large dataset collected to better capture the non-linearity of the relationship between the water leaving reflectance and turbidity level. The models achieve a good accuracy with a R2 score of 0.75 that is deemed acceptable in view of the uncertainties associated with construction and land reclamation work.