Wide-field-of-view (WFV) imager that observes the earth environment with four solar reflective bands in a spatial resolution of 16 m is equipped on board Gaofen-1 (GF-1) satellite. Chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentration in Lake Taihu, China from 2018 to 2019 is collected and collocated with GF-1 satellite data. This study develops a general and reliable estimation of Chl-a concentration from GF-1 WFV data under turbid inland water conditions. The col-located data are classified according to season and used in random forest (RF) regression to train models for retriev-ing the lake Chl-a concentration. A composite index is developed to select the most important variables in the mod-els. The models trained for each season show a better performance than the model trained by using the whole year data in terms of the coefficient of determination (R2) between retrievals and observations. Specifically, the R2 values in spring, summer, autumn, and winter are 0.88, 0.88, 0.94, and 0.74, respectively; whereas that using the whole year data is only 0.71. The Chl-a concentration in Lake Taihu exhibits an obvious seasonal change with the highest in summer, followed by autumn and spring, and the lowest in winter. The Chl-a concentration also displays an obvious spatial variation with season. A high concentration occurs mainly in the northwest of the lake. The temporal and spa-tial changes of Chl-a concentration are almost consistent with the changes in the areas and times of cyanobacteria blooms based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. The proposed algorithm can be op-erated without a priori knowledge on atmospheric conditions and water quality. Our study also demonstrates that GF-1 data are increasingly valuable for monitoring the Chl-a concentration of inland water bodies in China at a high spatial resolution.