This dissertation examines whether freely available satellite imagery from the European Copernicus programme can be used to monitor water quality around the Port of Batumi on Georgia's Black Sea coast. The research question sounds straightforward, but answering it turned out to require engaging with a surprisingly rich set of challenges — from understanding precisely how a satellite converts a light measurement into an estimate of water chemistry, to distinguishing between a natural ocean current and a pollution signal.

Two main data sources were used: Sentinel-2 Level-2A imagery accessed via Google Earth Engine (collection: COPERNICUS/S2_SR_HARMONIZED), and pre-processed water quality maps from the Copernicus Marine Service product OCEANCOLOUR_BLK_BGC_HR_L3_NRT_009_206, which provides daily chlorophyll-a, turbidity, and suspended matter data for the entire Black Sea at 100-metre resolution.

The satellite images show a measurable difference between water inside the port basin and the surrounding open Black Sea, detectable through three independent methods: visual colour analysis of the true colour composite, the Normalised Difference Water Index, and the quantitative turbidity product from the Copernicus Marine Service. Chlorophyll-a analysis reveals a more nuanced picture: elevated spring values near the port are driven primarily by the Batumi Eddy — a clockwise-rotating circular ocean current that forms seasonally near the coast — not by pollution. The Chorokhi River south of the port is the dominant natural driver of elevated sediment loads in the coastal zone.

The study concludes that Copernicus satellite data provides a scientifically valid, freely accessible, and reproducible framework for water quality monitoring at the Port of Batumi. The principal limitation is the absence of in-situ water sampling validation.