Authors: Swati Singh
Abstract: The River Ganga, one of India's most significant rivers, plays a major role in domestic, agricultural, industrial, ecological, and religious activities in Northern India. However, over the past few decades, its water quality has significantly declined due to increasing urbanization, industrial discharge, untreated sewage, and agricultural runoff. This study performs a temporal and seasonal assessment of turbidity and chlorophyll-a between 2019 and 2024 using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and Google Earth Engine (GEE). The research covers the entire stretch of the Ganga from Uttarakhand to West Bengal and analyzes four seasons (pre-monsoon, monsoon, post-monsoon, and winter). Sentinel-2 imagery was processed using cloud-based geospatial analysis techniques. Results show that turbidity increases during the monsoon due to sediment transport, while chlorophyll-a is found to be higher in urban areas like Kanpur and Varanasi due to nutrient enrichment. This study proves that remote sensing techniques are an effective and cost-effective tool for large-scale river management.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20176566
