Dredging and coastal infrastructure projects require apriori knowledge of the suspended sediment concentrations to be expected, and how they would vary over seasons and over a tidal cycle. There are often not enough field data, and measurement campaigns are costly and time-consuming. New technology is available to determine suspended sediment concentrations from Space. Moreover, sensors have been in orbit long enough to collect useful data covering several years.

The aim of the POWERS project was to prepare a service for water quality information based on MERIS observations. In this demonstration project the data of the MOS (phase-I) and SeaWiFS (phase-II) were taken; both instruments with characteristics similar to MERIS.