Monitoring Phycocyanin with Landsat 8/Operational Land Imager Orange Contra-Band

Abstract

The Operational Land Imager (OLI) onboard the Landsat 8 satellite has a panchromatic band (503–676 nm) that has been used to compute a virtual spectral band known as “orange contra-band” (590–635 nm). The major application of the orange contra-band is the monitoring of cyanobacteria which is usually quantified by the measurement of the concentration of phycocyanin (PC) which has an absorption peak around 620 nm. In this study, we evaluated the use of the orange contra-band approach for estimating PC concentration from in situ proximal hyperspectral data from Eagle Creek Reservoir (ECR), in Indiana, USA. We first validated the empirical relationship for the computation of the orange contra-band by using the panchromatic, red, and green spectral bands from ECR. PC concentration retrieval using the orange contra-band were not successful when using the entire dataset (R2 < 0.1) or when using only PC concentrations higher than 50 mg/m3 (R2 < 0.24). Better results were achieved when using samples in which PC was 1.5 times higher than the chlorophyll-a concentration (R2 = 0.84). These results highlighted the need for the development of remote sensing algorithms for the accurate estimation of PC concentration from non-PC dominant waters which could be use to track and/or predict cyanobacteria blooms.