Detection of Thermal Plume Signature in and around the Younggwang coastal waters of Korea using LANDSAT & NOAA Thermal Infrared Data

The thermal contamination of the Younggwang coastal marine ecosystem has been investigated using space borne thermal infrared data acquired over the period 1985-2003 by the Landsat and NOAA satellites. The analysis of AVHRR data brought out the general pattern and extension of thermal plume while TM data yielded more accurate information about the plume shape, dimension, dispersion direction etc. The examination of sea surface temperature (SST) computed from these images clearly indicates that the thermal plume extends 70 to100km southward during summer and 50 to70km northwestward during winter monsoons. The maximum plume temperature was 29$^{\circ}C$ in summer and 12$^{\circ}C$ in winter. The comparative analysis shows that the temperature retrieved from TM is slightly higher (1.8$^{\circ}C$, 3$^{\circ}C$ and 2.2$^{\circ}C$ for the images of 98/11/10, 99/05/05 and 99/05/21 respectively) than those derived from AVHRR data. The correlation coefficient between the TM-derived SST and AVHRR-derived SST was 0.72.