Water eutrophication in Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, has been considered to be an obstacle to aquatic environment protection and regional sustainable development. Chlorophyll-a concentration is one of the most important indices of water eutrophication. This paper builds seasonal chlorophyll-a concentration retrieval models using a semi-analytical model. Quarterly distributions of chlorophyll-a concentration from 2009 to 2012 are explored using multi-spectra data from a moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS). The correlation coefficient of the retrieval models primarily ranged from 0.6 to 0.9. The results show that the chlorophyll-a concentration in Poyang Lake has significant seasonality characteristics that present low values in the winter and spring, and present relatively high values in the summer and autumn; this report also presents an obvious, increasing trend of inter-annual variability from 2009 to 2012. The spatial distribution of the chlorophyll-a concentration has regional differences that give relatively high values adjacent to the shore in the north area of Poyang Lake, in the flow in river entries, and in the main channel area in the central and south areas of Poyang Lake. The natural hydrology features have a close relationship with the variation in the chlorophyll-a concentration. Intensive human activities are the main driving forces for the increasing chlorophyll-a concentration.
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