Data assimilation of satellite data of suspended particulate matter in Delft3d-waq for the North Sea

The role and value of data assimilation techniques have been verified in many engineering areas. In this paper, the data assimilation technique, Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF), is used to assimilate the remote sensing data of Suspended particulate matter (SPM) from the MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer instrument (MERIS) sensor on ESA’s ENVISAT in the computational water quality model, Delft3D-WAQ. The objective is to determine SPM concentrations and calculate the flux of marine silt along the Dutch coast. The first results are demonstrated together with the new aspects and challenges.