Sustainable service for monitoring and alerting water quality anomalies for aquaculture

Each year, harmful algae is estimated to cause €65 million in damage to insured salmon farm companies. The Salt Water service combines images from ESA's ENVISAT and the Copernicus Sentinel satellites with local in situ monitoring to improve the monitoring of surface water quality.

The objective of the Saltwater project is to establish a sustainable service for monitoring and alerting water quality anomalies for aquaculture. The study aims to develop and demonstrate services to the market place for surface water quality monitoring. The service combines the data interpretation of satellite imaging and local field monitoring. Satellite imagery can provide more information for aquaculture companies about the water quality, such as incoming phytoplankton blooms that can cause damage to the fish stocks. The current practices involve water sampling in remote and harsh locations after which the samples have to be analysed under a microscope to determine the phytoplankton density and composition. This is a time consuming activity and requires specific knowledge for the employees doing the microscopical analysis. The Saltwater service also provides two types of in situ monitoring instruments. These instruments are based on the same type of sensors used in satellites, which makes them complementary. The in situ measurements are used to develop and validate the algorithms for detecting phytoplankton. These sophisticated algorithms are applied to historical and recent satellite imagery. The data is provided through a web portal that displays satellite imagery as maps and in situ measurements as time series.