10:00–10:15 | ABSTRACT 1255
RIVER PLUME MAPPING USING TRANSITIONAL SYSTEM OPTICAL WATER TYPES
Coastal oceans and transitional waters represent both socio-economic and ecologically vital habitats, which are in turn heavily impacted by anthropogenic activities and climate change effects. Rivers are a primary source of land-based inputs to coastal marine systems, thus how river plumes extend along a coastline can provide a proxy for dispersal of riverine pollutants (e.g., excess nutrients, runoff from historic mining sites). Using pan-regional fuzzy c-means Optical Water Types (OWT), optimized specifically for Sentinel-2 MSI data, we investigate an automated tool for mapping the river plume footprint of 20 major river systems across the UK. Each river mouth system is characterized over nine years (2016–2024) through the most often occurring OWT classes. The river-specific OWT grouping is then used to classify plume extent for each river system into the coastal ocean and plume occurrence maps are built to represent the full timeseries as well as explore seasonal variability. Regional differences are observed along a latitudinal gradient, with best performance found for English and Welsh river systems. Using river plumes as a proxy, occurrence maps provide a nation-wide cost-effective assessment tool to estimate risk of riverine pollutants dispersal along the UK coastline.
Elizabeth Atwood, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, United Kingdom, [email protected], https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5434-2928
Andy Rees, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, United Kingdom, [email protected], https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3070-3447
