ESTIMATING SUSPENDED SEDIMENT CONCENTRATIONS IN SURFACE WATERS OF THE AMAZON RIVER WETLANDS FROM LANDSAT IMAGES

A method has been developed, based on spectral mixture analysis, to estimate the concentration of suspended sediment in surface waters of the Amazon River wetlands from Landsat MSS and TM images. Endmembers were derived from laboratory reflectance measurements of water-sediment mixtures with a range of sediment concentrations. Using these reference spectra, we applied a linear mixture analysis to multispectral images after accounting for instrument and atmosphere gains and offsets. Sediment concentrations were estimated for individual pixels from the mixture analysis results based on a nonlinear calibration curve relating laboratory sediment concentrations and reflectance to endmember fractions. The uncertainty in the sediment concentrations derived from this analysis for three Amazon images is predicted to be within +/- 20 mg/L, and the concentrations fall within a range of concentrations of suspended sediment that were measured at several times and places in the field over the past 15 years. The emphasis of our work is to use the patterns of sediment concentrations to compute the approximate volumes of sediment that are transferred between the main channel and floodplain of the Amazon River. However, the methodology can be applied universally if the optical properties of water and sediment at the site are known, and it is, therefore, useful for the study of suspended sediment concentrations in surface waters of wetlands elsewhere.