“These fine-scale image features are invisible in traditional satellite images or in SuperDove images without color enhancement,” said Yao, who is working with colleagues at USF to develop methods to better monitor and understand red tides. Also visible are some of the bloom’s more subtle details, including elongated strips and meanders near beaches and inside the Lemon Bay Aquatic Preserve in Charlotte County. Most of the bloom is offshore, beyond the wakes caused by two ships. Yao could also capture and track the bloom’s fine details using images acquired over the same area every one to two days.Īs a result of Yao’s image processing, areas with Karenia brevis appear red in the false-color image. Yao Yao, a marine science graduate student at USF, applied a processing technique to the 3-meter-resolution SuperDove data to enhance the visibility of the bloom. To the human eye (and in natural-color satellite imagery) this bloom would appear greenish and difficult to see amid the dark nearshore waters. The data were made available through NASA’s Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program.
The image is based on data from a Planet Labs SuperDove satellite of the PlanetScope constellation. This false-color image shows the west-central coast of Florida on February 26, 2023, during a red tide event that began in October 2022. Researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) found one way to overcome that challenge. But scientists have had difficulty using satellites to observe these blooms-commonly called “red tide” events-in areas close to beaches and inside small bays. Blooms of the harmful algae Karenia brevis occur regularly along the west coast of Florida, where they can add a green, brown, red, or black hue to the water.
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