Satellite detection of harmful algal bloom occurrences in Korean waters

Abstract

Cochlodinium polykrikoides ( p) is a planktonic dinoflagellate known to produce red tides responsible for massive fish kills and thereby serious economic loss in Korean coastal waters, particularly during summer and fall seasons. The present study involved analyzing chlorophyll- a (Chl- a) from SeaWiFS ocean color imagery collected over the period 1998–2002 to understand the spatial and temporal aspects of C. polykrikoides blooms that occurred in the enclosed and semi-enclosed bays of the Korean Southeast Sea. NOAA-AVHRR data were used to derive Sea Surface Temperature (SST) to elucidate physical factors affecting the spatial distribution and abundance of C. polykrikoides blooms. The time series of SeaWiFS-derived Chl- a gave an impression that recent red tide events with higher concentrations appeared to span more than 8 weeks during summer and fall seasons and were widespread in most of the Korean Southeast Sea coastal bays and neighboring oceanic waters. Coupled eutrophication and certain oceanic processes were thought to give rise to the formation of massive C. polykrikoides blooms with cell abundances ranging from 1000 to 30,000 cells ml −1, causing heavy mortalities of aquaculture fish and other marine organisms in these areas. Our analysis indicated that Chl- a estimates from SeaWiFS ocean color imagery appeared to be useful in demarcating the locality, spatial extent and distribution of these blooms, but unique identification of C. polykrikoides from non-bloom and sediment dominated waters remains unsuccessful with this data alone. Thus, the classical spectral enhancement and classification techniques such as Forward Principal Component Analysis (FPCA) and Minimum Spectral Distance (MSD) to uniquely identify and better understand C. polykrikoides blooms characteristics from other optical water types were attempted on both low spatial resolution SeaWiFS ocean color imagery and high spatial resolution Landsat-7 ETM+ imagery. Application of these techniques could capture intricate and striking patterns of C. polykrikoides blooms from surrounding non-bloom and sediment dominated waters, providing improved capability of detecting, predicting and monitoring C. polykrikoides bloom in such optically complex waters. The result obtained from MSD classification showed that retrieval of C. polykrikoides bloom from the mixed phase of this bloom with turbid waters was not feasible with the SeaWiFS ocean color imagery, but feasible with Landsat-7 ETM+ imagery that provided more accurate and comparable spatial C. polykrikoides patterns consistent with in situ observations. The dense phase of the bloom estimated from these imageries occupied an area of more than 25 km 2 around the coastal bays and the mixed phase extended over several hundreds kilometers towards the Southeast Sea offshore due to exchange of water masses caused by coastal and oceanic processes. Sea surface temperature analyzed from AVHRR infrared data captured the northeastward flow of Tsushima Warm Current (TWC) waters that provided favorable environmental conditions for the rapid growth and subsequent southward initiation of C. polykrikoides blooms in hydrodynamically active regions in the Korean Southeast Sea offshore.