The Gorky Reservoir, on the Volga, develops intense blue-green algal blooms in summer, during which its optical properties vary on scales of tens of metres and shift with currents and wind — conditions under which station-based sampling is largely uninformative. To capture that variability, in-water constituents were measured by ultraviolet fluorescence LiDAR alongside remote-sensing reflectance from a single radiometer, run together from a high-speed gliding motorboat.
In about two hours the survey collected 4,087 synchronised LiDAR and radiometric measurements at 8-metre resolution. The portion coincident with a Sentinel-2 overpass was used to build regional retrieval algorithms for chlorophyll a and suspended matter — the first such work for inland waters of this kind, and transferable to the other Volga reservoirs. Published in Remote Sensing (2019).