Water Quality Monitor
The VMM has the task of measuring and reporting surface water quality in Flanders. The quality element phytoplankton is reported on the basis of chlorophyll-a concentrations and is currently being measured manually in 100 rivers and 16 lakes.
Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite images, that are available every 5 days, and remote sensing technology can be used to produce time series of chlorophyll-a maps. These chlorophyll-a products are provided to VMM via the online Water Monitor platform developed here at Nazka Mapps, in collaboration with VITO. The Water Monitor allows VMM to easily search, navigate and monitor chlorophyll-a temporally and spatially for Flemish water bodies.
The first beta version, a static Water Monitor, was developed together with VITO in 2019. In the summer of 2020 we released a new version of the Water Monitor to offer near-real-time water quality monitoring. This version is a close collaboration with the Earth Observation Data Science programme of the Flanders Information Agency, VITO and VMM.
