RESORT - HOME

Each year, dredging companies remove more than two million m³ of estuarine sediment from the Scheldt River (Belgium). This is necessary to assure access to the harbour of Antwerp. International Marine and Dredging Consultants (IMDC) advises government agencies and dredging companies to help them carry out their activities. Images of the sediment concentration are essential if accurate advice is to be given. IMDC uses this information to select new salvage locations, to estimate possible movements of sediment clouds and to calibrate sediment transport models. For these reasons, they rely on VITO to develop a method to map at a given time the surface sediment concentrations over large areas.

In 2005 VITO and IMDC started the ORMES project, a stereo I project financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office. The main goal was to derive (surface) concentrations of suspended sediment in the Scheldt river from hyperspectral imagery and to develop the SPM mapping software ‘SedMap’ for IMDC in view of a more operational monitoring. The results of the ORMES project were very satisfying and the software is ready to be implemented at IMDC. In January 2006 both partners set up a follow-up project (RESORT) in the framework of STEREO II. RESORT (REmote sensing for Seasonal and Overseas Retrieval of TSM) builds on the knowledge gained in the ORMES project and aims to:
(1) identify the applicability of the ORMES algorithms in other seasons.
(2) optimize/test a satellite algorithm that is not specific to the Scheldt but can be applied to each case II water.
(3) gain insight into the relationship between spectral reflectance and Particle Size Distribution
(4) implement new findings into the ORMES software.