Lake Balaton, one of the largest shallow lakes in Europe, is optically complex — turbid, productive, and highly variable in space and time — which made it an early proving ground for ship-mounted ultraviolet fluorescence LiDAR. A mapping campaign produced 27,160 measurement points, yielding simultaneous maps of chlorophyll a, total suspended matter, and coloured dissolved organic matter across the lake.
The Balaton work, carried out with the Balaton Limnological Research Institute and validated against MODIS/Terra imagery, was the basis for the first peer-reviewed assessment of ship-mounted fluorescence LiDAR in freshwater lake conditions (Remote Sensing, 2013) — demonstrating that the method holds up in the more complicated hydro-optics of inland waters, not only the open ocean.