Publications

Bagherian, K; Fernández-Figueroa, EG; Rogers, SR; Wilson, AE; Bao, Y (2024). PREDICTING CHLOROPHYLL CHLOROPHYLL-a CONCENTRATION AND HARMFUL ALGAL BLOOMS IN LAKE OKEECHOBEE USING TIME-SERIES MODIS SATELLITE IMAGERY AND LONG SHORT-TERM MEMORY. JOURNAL OF THE ASABE, 67(5), 1191-1202.

Abstract
. Harmful algal blooms (HABs) in inland waterbodies are a global concern due to their negative impact on human, animal, and ecosystem health. Chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentration is an important water quality parameter for monitoring HABs. While statistical and machine learning (ML) models have been widely studied to predict Chl-a concentration and HABs based on single-time-point satellite data, this work assessed whether long short-term memory (LSTM) can improve both tasks by leveraging temporal features in time-series MODIS satellite images compared to three classical ML models, including k-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector regression (SVR), and random forest (RF). A dataset of daily MODIS images and monthly in situ Chl-a concentration measurements from 2011 to 2020 was curated for Lake Okeechobee, Florida. A window size of 13 days with a temporal resolution of four days was found to produce the optimal performance for LSTM, which significantly outperformed KNN, SVR, and RF for Chl-a prediction with a root mean square error of 11.95 mu g/L, a mean absolute error of 8.55 mu g/L, and a R2 value of 0.43. The superior performance of LSTM for Chl-a prediction was likely due to its ability to leverage the temporal dynamics in the features associated with HAB development. The Chl-a predictions were further used to determine HAB events, showing better accuracy and a significantly higher F1 score for LSTM over the other models. The study suggested that combining LSTM with high-temporal-resolution time-series data should be preferred over applying common ML models on time-series or single-time-point remote sensing data for Chl-a and HAB monitoring.

DOI:
10.13031/ja.15995

ISSN:
2769-3287