Google earth engine based monitoring spatio-temporal variability of Kızılırmak River plume

Abstract Kızılırmak, which is one of the most important rivers of the Southern Black Sea coast, discharged into the Black Sea by draining a very large basin extending to mid Anatolia. A turbid freshwater mass is transferred from the basin into the Black Sea as result of seasonally intense precipitation characteristics. In this study, the dynamics of turbid water bodies occurring at the river mouth of the Kızılırmak delta were investigated by remote sensing techniques using Google Earth Engine based automatic detection algorithm. The novelty of the proposed algorithm is the automatic detection and classification of coastal plume zones on the Google Earth Engine platform and the analysis of their temporal changes. The presence of plume was detected in 110 of the total 1750 multispectral satellite images analyzed in the study. Two seasonal peaks where plume frequency increased were detected, namely March–April and September–October. The temporal formation and decay of plumes was followed in 12 out of 110 plume presence images. Depending on the wind direction and intensity, the largest traced plume area is 105.32 km2 and belongs to January 2017. During the study, especially cloudiness emerged as an important problem. Therefore, plume could not be determined on an annual basis for each month in the study. The practical results of this study are especially important for the management of fishing and recreational activities. The proposed algorithm proved that under clean atmospheric conditions plume dynamics of this unique deltaic area could be easily detected.