SeaWiFS Ocean Color Imagery Research Articles

Atmospheric correction of SeaWiFS ocean color imagery in the presence of absorbing aerosols off the Indian coast using a neuro‐variational method

This paper presents a comparison of the atmospheric correction accuracy between the standard sea‐viewing wide field‐of‐view sensor (SeaWiFS) algorithm and the NeuroVaria algorithm for the ocean off the Indian coast in March 1999. NeuroVaria is a general method developed to retrieve aerosol optical properties and water‐leaving reflectances for all types of aerosols, including absorbing ones. It has been applied to SeaWiFS images of March 1999, during an episode of transport of absorbing aerosols coming from pollutant sources in India. Water‐leaving reflectances and aerosol optical thickness estimated by the two methods were extracted along a transect across the aerosol plume for three days. The comparison showed that NeuroVaria allows the retrieval of oceanic properties in the presence of absorbing aerosols with a better spatial and temporal stability than the standard SeaWiFS algorithm. NeuroVaria was then applied to the available SeaWiFS images over a two‐week period. NeuroVaria algorithm retrieves ocean products for a larger number of pixels than the standard one and eliminates most of the discontinuities and artifacts associated with the standard algorithm in presence of absorbing aerosols.

Satellite detection of harmful algal bloom occurrences in Korean waters

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.

MONITOR SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL PATTERNS OF SUSPENDED SEDIMENTS IN THE EAST CHINA AND YELLOW SEAS USING SEAWIFS DATA

Striking patterns of suspended sediments created by a complex interplay of physical, chemical, biological and geological processes in the East China Sea (ECS) and Yellow Sea (YS) have been investigated using SeaWiFS ocean color imagery. The structure of these patterns can reveal a great deal about the processes underlying their formation. Sea surface temperature (SST) analyzed from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) thermal infrared data and in-situ were used to elucidate the physical factors responsible for the evolution of such patterns in the inner and outer selves areas, whilst concomitant patterns of suspended sediment were tracked from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) ocean color imagery. A careful analysis of these patterns in conjugation with other data gave birth to the definition of the evolution of suspended sediments (SS) into four stages: (1) Infant Stage, (2) Younger Stage, (3) Mature Stage and (4) Old Stage. Each of these stages experiences the different characteristics of waters and numerous physical mechanisms that control pattern formation during the winter monsoon. Vertical and horizontal profiles of suspended sediments appear to be useful in predicting the evolution of these stages, of these, the younger stage is identified as important candidate to represent the intrusion of Yellow Sea Warm Current (YSWC) to the northwest of the Jeju-Island

Validation study of the SeaWiFS oxygen A-band absorption correction: comparing the retrieved cloud optical thicknesses from SeaWiFS measurements

Atmospheric correction in ocean-color remote sensing corrects more than 90% of signals in the visible contributed from the atmosphere measured at satellite altitude. The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) atmospheric correction uses radiances measured at two near-infrared wavelengths centered at 765 and 865 nm to estimate the atmospheric contribution and extrapolate it into the visible range. However, the SeaWiFS 765-nm band, which covers 745-785 nm, completely encompasses the oxygen A-band absorption. The O(2) A-band absorption usually reduces more than 10-15% of the measured radiance at the SeaWiFS 765-nm band. Ding and Gordon [Appl. Opt. 34, 2068-2080 (1995)] proposed a numerical scheme to remove the O(2) A-band absorption effects from the atmospheric correction. This scheme has been implemented in the SeaWiFS ocean-color imagery data-processing system. I present results that demonstrate a method to validate the SeaWiFS 765-nm O(2) A-band absorption correction by analyzing the sensor-measured radiances at 765 and 865 nm taken looking at the clouds over the oceans. SeaWiFS is usually not saturated with cloudy scenes because of its bilinear gain design. Because the optical and radiative properties of water clouds are nearly independent of the wavelengths ranging from 400 to 865 nm, the sensor-measured radiances above the cloud at the two near-infrared wavelengths are comparable. The retrieved cloud optical thicknesses from the SeaWiFS band 7 measurements are compared for cases with and without the O(2) A-band absorption corrections and from the band 8 measurements. The results show that, for air-mass values of 2-5, the current SeaWiFS O(2) A-band absorption correction works reasonably well. The validation method is potentially applicable for in-orbit relative calibration for SeaWiFS and other satellite sensors.