The importance of global synchronous observation for estimating oceanic chlorophyll-a

Abstract

Over the last three decades, ocean color satellites have recorded continuous change in phytoplankton concentration, and in doing so, the satellites have helped marine remote sensing to become an emerging discipline. However, ocean color satellite has provided the state of global phytoplankton only around midday whereas phytoplankton have significant diurnal variation characteristics over an entire day-night cycle, which would lead to large estimation uncertainty in downstream products. A large global field observations show that the diurnal variation curves can be constructed as the sum of an exponential and a polynomial function. After correction with our diurnal variation curves, the intermission difference between MODISA and MODIST phytoplankton product could be decreased from 7.57% to 6%, which is critical to monitor the long-term changing trend with multi-mission data. When the satellite-recorded chlorophyll-a concentration is simply equal to a daily average value, it results in overestimating uncertainties of 16% and 54% for the northern and southern hemispheric oceans, respectively. Moreover, as a typical example of downstream product of the chlorophyll-a, the coverage of oligotrophic waters can oscillate 76% from day to night simulated from satellite images with our diurnal variation curves, further confirming the importance of global synchronous observation. The geostationary satellite might be an efficient regional tool for diurnal observation, but it must account for its limitations under the weak light conditions of early morning and late afternoon. In the real world, the effects of diurnal variations in ocean properties reach far beyond chlorophyll-a in the global oceans. We anticipate these quantitatively findings to be a starting point for quantitatively re-examining the proper application of ocean color products in scientific communication.