Monitoring Thermal Plumes from Power Plants Using Ecostress and Landsat

Many nuclear power plants across the world feature once-through cooling, a system that takes adjacent water to cool reactors and discharges its used water into the same water body at a higher temperature. Usually, thermal effluent monitoring emphasizes discharge temperatures with less importance put on the thermal plume created by this temperature increase. Point sources of thermal pollution from the nuclear power plants add thermal stress to the local marine ecosystems that may lead to shifts in the size, spatial range, and abundance of aquatic species populations. Such thermal pollution may further impact ecosystems far beyond the point of release. This study examines the thermal plume created by the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant as a case study using two different satellite sensors. The ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) was launched in 2018, capturing thermal imagery every three to five days and features a native resolution of 70m per pixel. In comparison, Landsat 8 has been capturing imagery since 2013 every sixteen days at a native resolution of 100m (scaled down to 30m). Through the use of Google Earth Engine's (GEE), sea surface temperature around the power plant was displayed and the thermal plume's spatial extent was determined for both satellites. This study can help understand the thermal extents of power plant cooling and significantly aid in monitoring said plumes.