RIPRAP

The application made available through this software release is designed to provide access to information on water quality derived from remotely sensed data and to facilitate analysis of the resulting images. The software provides a convenient means of obtaining a variety of different metrics and is thus referred to as RSWQ (Remote Sensing of Water Quality) Image Product Retrieval and Analysis Program, or RIPRAP for short. For the purposes of this software release, the general term water quality is used in a more specific sense to refer to a finite set of data products describing the presence and abundance of cyanobacteria, chlorophyll concentration, turbidity, water color, and surface temperature. Although the program is intended for use with a water quality model developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) for monitoring potentially harmful algal blooms (HABs) as part of a new framework for Integrating Satellite Observations with CE-QUAL-W2 Algal Modeling (ISOCAM), the software was designed to be flexible and capable of supporting any application that might benefit from incorporating RSWQ data.

RIPRAP includes basic functionality for defining an area and time period of interest, selecting RSWQ products and retrieving them from online servers, visualizing the resulting images, producing statistical summaries of the data, and exporting tabular and graphical outputs for further analysis, among other features.

Image products available through RIPRAP include:
1. Chlorophyll concentrations in areas with cyanobacteria inferred from Sentinel-3 images
2. Surface temperatures derived from Landsat images
3. Chlorophyll fluorescence inferred from Sentinel-2 images
4. Turbidity inferred from Sentinel-2 images
5. Indices of water color inferred from Sentinel-2 images

An overview of these products is provided in a tutorial document available from the repository that illustrates how to use the software and includes links to online resources with further detail on each type of data. By making all these products accessible via a common, convenient interface, RIPRAP gives end users a number of options for examining water quality. The choice of which product(s) to use depends on the application context.