Frequent Synoptic Monitoring of Cyanobacterial Harmful Algal Blooms for
Potential Prevention of Disease Outbreak
Abstract
Cyanobacterial Harmful Algal Blooms (CyanoHABs) are progressively
becoming a major water quality and public health hazard worldwide.
Untreated CyanoHABs can severely affect human health due to their toxin
producing ability, causing physiological and neurological disorders such
as non-alcoholic liver disease, dementia to name a few. Transfer of
these cyanotoxins via food-chain only accelerates public health hazards.
CyanoHABs can potentially also lead to a decline in aquatic and animal
life, hampering recreational activities at waterbodies and ultimately
affecting the country’s economy gravely. CyanoHABs require nutrient rich
warm aquatic environments to bloom and their proliferation in
increasingly warmer areas of the world can be an indirect indicator of
global climate change. Many lakes in the United States have been
experiencing such CyanoHABs in the summers, which only grow severe every
coming year, and this is consistently leading to increased public health
implications. A recent study (September, 2021) by the Centre for Disease
Control quantified hospital visits with the trend of such CyanoHABs to
indeed observe a strong correlation between the two. This necessitates a
need for a user-friendly and accessible infrastructure to monitor inland
and coastal waterbodies throughout the U.S for such blooms. We present a
remote sensing-based approach wrapped in a lucid web-app,
“CyanoTRACKER”, which can help detect CyanoHABs on a global level and
act as an early warning system, potentially preventing/lessening public
health implications. CyanoHABs are dominated by the Phycocyanin pigment,
which absorbs sunlight strongly around 620 nm wavelength. Owing to this
specific absorption characteristic and the availability of a satellite
band at exactly 620 nm, we use the opensource Sentinel-3 OLCI satellite
data to detect the presence of CyanoHABs. CyanoTracker is a
user-friendly Google Earth Engine dashboard, which is easily accessible
via only a browser and an internet connection and allows for a variety
of near-daily analysis options such as: a) select any location
throughout the world and view satellite image based on date-range of
choice, b) click on any pixel in the satellite image and detect
presence/absence of cyanobacteria, c) visualize the spatial spread as
well as the temporal phenology of an ongoing bloom or a potential
incoming bloom. This dashboard is easily accessible to water-managers
and in fact, anyone who wishes to use it with minimal training and can
effectively serve as an early warning system to CyanoHAB induced disease
outbreaks.