Ocean Colour Remote Sensing in Chinese Marginal Seas

Abstract

The Chinese marginal seas are some of the largest marginal seas in the world, which include the South China Sea (SCS), East China Sea (ECS), Yellow Sea (YS), and Bohai Sea (BS). The SCS is the largest tropical marginal sea and the ECS is the 11th largest marginal sea in the world. Both are within the world’s strongest monsoon area–the East Asian monsoon, with significant seasonal and interannual variations and even long-term changes. Moreover, the Chinese marginal seas receive a tremendous amount of fresh water and terrestrial materials from several world’s largest rivers, such as the Changjiang (largest river in the Eurasian continent), Yellow River, Pearl River, and Mekong River, which make the seas more vulnerable to anthropogenic influences. Considering field investigations being limited in space and temporal coverage, satellite ocean colour remote technique has been used widely in the Chinese marginal seas to investigate environmental dynamics at different time scales from diurnal, daily, seasonal to interannual variation. In this chapter, we highlight some of the new techniques and applications of satellite ocean colour remote sensing in Chinese marginal seas in the past few years, including detecting diurnal dynamics of coastal waters, retrieval of marine carbon parameters, monitoring of marine ecologic environment, and satellite oceanographic research.