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Evaluation of the Surface Temperature Applied in Aquaculture Based on Satellite Images in Coastal Ecuador

Abstract:

The surface temperature is the radiant temperature of the earth’s surface. It is also a fundamental variable when determining the climatic variability on a coverage of interest. We evaluated the surface temperature in shrimp ponds present in the Puná Island located in southwestern Ecuador, for the years 2014 to 2017, from Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS images and ASTER-GED emissivity data, as the biophysical characteristics that this island presents have become one of the main reasons for a large number of shrimp companies to base operations in this territory. An example of this is the presence of several pools that meet specific temperature parameters for the cultivation of the species Litopenaeus vannamei, better known as the Pacific white shrimp. There are a variety of algorithms to calculate the surface temperature. We applied four different algorithms, of which the first two are split-window, based on the differential absorption of two thermal bands to correct the atmospheric effects. There residual two algorithms are two mono-channels, which use the radiance of a thermal band and perform the residual atmospheric correction through of atmospheric parameters. Hereby, the split-window algorithm stands out, which indicated an average surface temperature for the four years in the range of 26.38 ℃ to 30.59 ℃. It is also within the optimum range (22 ℃ to 30 ℃) for the cultivation of this species. Therefore, our study most likely represents as a possible alternative to other methods, the use of remote sensing for the estimation of the surface temperature in large areas of shrimp ponds.