Algae (Microcystis and Scenedesmus) absorption spectra and its application on Chlorophyll a retrieval

Abstract

Blue algae and green algae are the dominant phytoplankton groups that contribute to the eutrophication and the water bloom in inland water of China. The absorption coefficients (spectra) of the algae, which do not change with its intrinsic optical characteristics and the observation geometry, are strictly additive quantities. The characteristics of the absorption spectra of the two algae are presented. The pure blue algae and the pure green algae cultured in the laboratory environment are diluted and mixed at ten volume ratios. The Quantitative Filter Technique was applied to measure their absorption spectra. The “hot-ethanol extraction” method was chosen to calculate their concentration of Chlorophyll a. The retrieval algorithm developed in this study extracts the mapping information between each individual alga and their Chlorophyll a concentration via Continuous Wavelet Transform, and retrieves the Chlorophyll a concentration of each alga in their mixture using a trust region optimizer. The results show that the retrieved and the measured Chlorophyll a concentrations of the blue algae and the green algae components in the ten mixture match well with the average relative error of 5.55%.