ANALYSIS OF THE REMOTELY SENSED WATER QUALITY PARAMETERS OF THE INSUBRIC LAKES: METHODS AND RESULTS OF THE INTERREG SIMILE PROJECT

Abstract. Lakes are a fundamental component of the environment and the territory and represent a precious source of fresh water for various uses. The area of the Prealps north of the Po valley in Italy is characterized by the presence of lakes which represent almost 80% of the total volume of fresh water in Italy (Rogora et al., 2018). The Insubric lakes (Lugano, Maggiore and Como) have their shared basins between Italy and Switzerland, and they are the objective of the SIMILE project, a cross-border Italian-Swiss project that aims to improve their coordinated management and strengthen stakeholder participation in the processes of knowledge and monitoring of water resources (Brovelli et al., 2019) by analyzing data acquired from in-situ to satellite sensors. The present work refers to data collected by remote sensing methods which offer the possibility to obtain synoptic views of water bodies to monitor water quality parameters (WQPs) such as the chlorophyll-a (Chl-a), the total suspended matter (TSM) and the lake surface water temperature (LSWT) (Giardino et al., 2013). This work presents an extensive evaluation of the space-time trends of the parameters based on the SIMILE remote sensing database.