Jessie Turner

The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the U.S. with the highest land-to-water ratio of any estuarine watershed in the world. Management policies actively limit watershed inputs of nutrients and sediments to the estuary. In this heavily-populated, highly-managed system, it is imperative to understand water clarity change over time. Spatially, this estuary has been examined with cruise-based observations, coarse spatial resolution satellite data, and 3D models, yet it lacks examination at finer spatial resolutions. Temporally, a gap exists in traditional ocean color satellite missions between 1986- 1997. This study aims to fill spatial and temporal gaps using Landsat heritage missions, three decades of 30-m resolution imagery that can be used to monitor water clarity change over time. Although primarily designed to study bright land surfaces rather than dark water surfaces, aquatic applications are practical in turbid waters that contain more lightreflecting materials. Remote sensing reflectance of the red colored band (Rrs660), highly correlated to water turbidity, was analyzed from the Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper, Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper, and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager instruments. Rrs660 variability was evaluated using monthly composites from 1984-2019. Preliminary results suggest that Chesapeake Bay waters are sufficiently turbid to allow Landsat instruments to provide robust information regarding long term trends in water clarity throughout the Bay, and reveal variability on both seasonal and interannual time scales.

Jessie Turner is a Ph.D. candidate at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, at William & Mary’s School of Marine Science. She studies water clarity at local and regional scales, including observations, 3D numerical modeling, and satellite remote sensing. She holds a B.S. from Bowdoin College in Earth & Oceanographic Science and an M.S. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Oceanography.