Regional challenges for development of satellite ocean color algorithms

Abstract

ABSTRACT The planned launch of several ocean color sensors in the next few years will usher in a new era in oceanography in which a continuous time-series of global ocean color data will be available for 15-20 years. With appropriate effort on the part of oceanographers and Earth scientists in applying ocean color data, it is not unreasonable to expect that this could become a perpetual time-series applied to monitoring the status of the Earth's carbon cycle. To fulfill this objective, it is imperative to develop appropriate algorithms to retrieve not only surface phytoplankton pigments, but also primary production and the organic carbon exported from the surface photic zone to the ocean interior. Challenges to these objectives, and some consideration of methods are presented.