Monitoring of monthly scale chlorophyll concentration variability in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea using MODIS Aqua Satellite Data

Abstract

Study has been carried out to monitor the phytoplankton biomass in Bay of Bengal (BoB) and Arabian Sea (AS) using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Aqua satellite data. Cloud masking, geometric corrections and subsets generations were performed to retrieve chlorophyll images from MODIS-Aqua data during the periods January - December for the years 2007 and 2008. The two regions (BoB & AS) have been divided into four subsets; subset-1 (Northern Bay of Bengal), subset-2 (Southern Bay of Bengal), subset-3 (Northern Arabian Sea) and subset-4 (Southern Arabian Sea). The results were analyzed and confirmed that chlorophyll concentration mean range was high (0.97-1.89 mg m-3) in northern Arabian Sea during the months of July for both years 2007 and 2008 and low concentration range (0.12-0.35 mg m-3) was obtained during April month for both years in southern Bay of Bengal. This study found to be important as information about the chlorophyll concentration in the Northern Indian Ocean.