Detection of Coral Reef Bleaching Based on Sentinel-2 Multi-Temporal Imagery: Simulation and Case Study

Sentinel-2 mission has been shown to have promising applications in coral reef remote sensing because of its superior properties. It has a 5-day revisit time, spatial resolution of 10 m, free data, etc. In this study, Sentinel-2 imagery was investigated for bleaching detection through simulations and a case study over the Lizard Island, Australia. The spectral and image simulations based on the semianalytical (SA) model and the sensor spectral response function, respectively, confirmed that coral bleaching cannot be detected only using one image, and the change analysis was proposed for detection because there will be a featured change signal for bleached corals. Band 2 of Sentinel-2 is superior to its other bands for the overall consideration of signal attenuation and spatial resolution. However, the detection capability of Sentinel-2 is still limited by the water depth. With rapid signal attenuation due to the water absorption effect, the applicable water depth for bleaching detection was recommended to be less than 10 m. The change analysis was conducted using two methods: one radiometric normalization with pseudo invariant features (PIFs) and the other with multi-temporal depth invariant indices (DII). The former performed better than the latter in terms of classification. The bleached corals maps obtained using the PIFs and DII approaches had an overall accuracy of 88.9 and 57.1%, respectively. Compared with the change analysis based on two dated images, the use of a third image that recorded the spectral signals of recovered corals or corals overgrown by algae after bleaching significantly improved the detection accuracy. All the preliminary results of this article will aid in the future studies on coral bleaching detection based on remote sensing.