Remote sensing of water quality in a watershed and its relationship with wildfires, precipitation and urban growth

Water has historically been considered a renewable resource, however in the last century a sustained degradation of its quality has been observed, both in continental and oceanic systems due to the anthropic impact. Added to this problem, a new global threat global appears, climate change, causing severe droughts or extraordinary floods in different regions of the planet. In this framework, the management of water resources and satellite monitoring represent a central point in public policies, since they allow us to anticipate and adapt to these disturbances. In this work, satellite information is use to perform an analysis of the annual evolution of the water quality of the San Roque reservoir, Córdoba, and its relationship with the occurrence of fires, rainfall and urban growth for the period 2001-2016. Water quality is evaluated from a time series of chlorophyll-a generated with MODISTERRA data and previously validated for the water body of study. The constructed and burned area is calculated from the classification of LANDSAT-TM / ETM + / OLI images for the basin. Accumulated precipitation is obtained from the products of NASA's TRMM mission. The temperature in the water reservoir is also analyzed, obtained from MODIS-TERRA data. Finally, correlation analysis between the mentioned variables is studied.