For a lake system in The Netherlands, Secchi disk transparency, seston dry weight, vertical attenuation coefficients, chlorophyll-a, and phaeopigments were determined. Inherent optical properties were estimated from measured apparent optical properties. Subsurface spectroradiometric measurements and airborne (non)-imaging spectrometric measurements were performed. This made it possible to model the performance of high-resolution multispectral scanning systems. Results of multivariate statistical modeling of water quality parameters versus simulated spectral band ratios for a water quality spectral bandset of the Programmable Multispectral Imager (PMI) (also known as the FLI-Fluorescence Line Imager) developed by Moniteq Inc. are presented. An application of these results to actual remote sensing imagery demonstrates the effectiveness of the modeling. Airborne measured spectra made verification of the subsurface modeling results possible.