Coastal Marine Environment Monitoring Using Satellite Data Derived from MODIS Instrument

Abstract

The quality of marine environment has a vital importance for the sustainable future of the Earth. On the other hand, the human activities, the sea commerce and transportation, affect significantly the marine environment especially in coastal areas, port areas, and the sea corridors. These induced activities impose contiguous and accurate methods for marine environment monitoring. Nowadays, modern satellite instruments gather data and the relative products derived from them can be used as an alternative, robust, and accurate way to monitor many basic marine parameters such as chlorophyll, sea surface temperature (SST), euphotic depth, dissolved organic matter and examine their long-term (climatic) tendencies. This study comprises an effort to assess the accuracy of satellite products, comparing them with relative ground-based measurements and it also focuses on provision of satellite-based mean variations on monthly basis regarding two important marine parameters (Chlorophyll-a and SST). In this study, available measurements of two different ports are used, i.e., the port of Bar in Montenegro and the port of Burgas in Bulgaria, which are partners of Transnational ENhancement of ECOPORT8 network (TEN ECOPORT) project.