In Situ Water Quality Data for the Chesapeake Bay.

This paper examines in situ water quality data measured during 2020-2021 in the Chesapeake Bay for comparison with optical satellite data. This collection was performed as part of a NASA project aiming to develop new methods for water quality monitoring from satellite remote sensing using artificial intelligence. Our objective is to use in situ data as ground-truth to provide water quality classifications, or labels, to their overlapping (in time and location) satellite imagery. Having such labeled data, can help us achieve our project's longer-term goal: to train artificial intelligence models to recognize features in spectral information for monitoring water quality from satellites. Because routine monitoring by state agencies is conducted at discrete locations, we obtained a flow-through system operated from small boats to measure water quality parameters along transects for comparison with two-dimensional maps collected from space, with an initial focus on low oxygen events, due to their large spatial extent and regular occurrence each summer. We also evaluated similar in situ data collected during 1984-2021 by the Chesapeake Program.