Innovators TIGER - Lake Quality Egypt

The main objective of this project is to design, develop and implement an Earth Observation (EO)-based capacity for the operational monitoring of water quality in Lake Manzalah, Egypt. Lakes are a precious source of freshwater in Egypt, and the usage of lake water must be carefully managed to satisfy a variety of different, and often competing, domestic, agricultural and industrial uses. Key to the formulation of adequate water management scenarios is accurate and reliable information on the occurrence and distribution of water quality indicators, such as turbidity, algal blooms or areas infested with invasive plant species. The project will provide a set of comprehensive water quality products derived from EO data in a regular manner. The extraction of water quality information from satellite imagery will make use of the existing in-situ monitoring network for data calibration and validation.

Responding to urgent user information requirements, the EO-based water quality products will represent an up-scaling in space and time of the conventional field measurements and will capture the spatiotemporal variability of critical lake water quality parameters more accurately than the current monitoring program. The final products will be made available to a wide range of local stakeholders. Weekly products to be generated include turbidity, chlorophyll-a concentration and suspended sediment concentration, while aquatic vegetation cover and reclaimed areas will be available on a monthly and quarterly basis, respectively.

The project team includes partners from Egypt, Canada and Finland: C-CORE (Canada), Finnish Environment Institute (Finland), Water Resources Management Division, Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Environment and Conservation (Canada), Drainage Research Institute (Egypt) and Survey Research Institute (Egypt).