Assessment of the MCC method to estimate sea surface currents in highly turbid coastal waters from GOCI

Abstract

ABSTRACTPrevious studies have demonstrated that the Geostationary Ocean Colour Imager (GOCI) could retrieve sea surface currents accurately in low-moderate turbid coastal waters, based on maximum cross-correlation (MCC) technique. However, its performance in highly turbid waters remains unclear. In this study, the MCC method is used to derive hourly sea surface currents in Hangzhou Bay (HZB) with highly turbid waters from the GOCI data, and its performance is examined by in situ measurements and model simulations. The results show that the GOCI-derived sea surface currents can catch tidal phase variations well, yet the performance of the derived velocity is not as good as the previous studies in low-moderate turbid waters. The reason may be due to the rapid deposition and resuspension processes of suspended particulate matter in high turbidity waters, which contaminate the MCC pattern tracking. The GOCI-derived deposition and resuspension rates can reach up to about 190 and 270 mg l–1 h–1 in HZB, respectively, which demonstrates that the potential of geostationary ocean colour imagery in deriving the suspended particle deposition and resuspension rates.