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CS 229 Project : Identifying Regions of High Turbidity in San Francisco Bay

Suspended sediments in oceans, seas, and estuaries shape coastal geography, provide important nutrients to ecosystems, and transport and bury harmful contaminants. Although the problem has significant interest in the scientific and environmental engineering communities, many of the the mechanisms involved are poorly understood because of the difficulty and expense of measuring what turns out to be a very complex system. The complexity arises from the fact that many estuaries are dynamic regions, where the currents that move sediment depend on rainfall, wind, waves, tides, salinity gradients, and anthropogenic manipulation (dams, weirs, etc.). On top of this the physics of how sediment particles interact with the sea bed and one another is still poorly understood, especially at the scales of interest to biologists and coastal engineers. Because of these challenges the development of tools to study the problem is an active area of research. The traditional tools of studying sediment transport are in situ field measurements and numerical models, and these each face challenges. Because of the small scale of in situ sampling methods, it is often difficult (and very expensive) to collect data over a large enough area to develop a strong regional understanding of what is happening. Numerical models have thus gained popularity as a way to predict suspended sediment concentrations (SSC), erosion, and deposition, but these contend with their own problems of unknown boundary conditions and poorly understood transport physics for silts and clays. To help fill the gap left in these two technologies, there has been work to develop remote sensing algorithms using available NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) satellite imagery to map turbidity, an optical measure of the cloudiness of water, which serves as a proxy for SSC. This is still a young technology and has substantial room for development. San Francisco Bay is an excellent example of a system that showcases many of importances of sediments and the challenges with understanding them. For one, it is a well studied estuary with ample of measurements about the flow and sediment conditions publicly available. This project’s goal is to establish a relationship between available remote sensing data and in situ measurements of turbidity in San Francisco Bay. This requires correlating the data at the particular pixel of the measurement (and perhaps its neighbors) with the measurement itself. This has been studied in other estuaries [1] and there are products available that can calculate turbidity, but these are not calibrated for our area of interest.