Correction of Sensor Saturation Effects in MODIS Oceanic Particulate Inorganic Carbon

Land, PE, Shutler, JD and Smyth, TJ 2017 Correction of Sensor Saturation Effects in MODIS Oceanic Particulate Inorganic Carbon. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2017.2763456

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2017.2763456

Abstract/Summary

The highly reflective nature of high particulate inorganic carbon (PIC) from calcifying plankton, such as surface blooms of Emiliana huxleyi in the latter stages of their life cycle, can cause the saturation of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) visible spectrum ocean color bands. This saturation results in errors in the standard MODIS oceanic PIC product, resulting in the highest PIC levels being represented as cloud-like gaps (missing data) in daily level 2 data, and as either gaps or erroneously low PIC values in temporally averaged data (e.g., 8-day level 3 data). A method is described to correct this error and to reconstruct the missing data in the ocean color band data by regressing the 1-km spatial resolution ocean color bands against MODIS higher resolution (500 m spatial resolution) bands with lower sensitivities. The method is applied to all North Atlantic MODIS data from 2002 to 2014. This shows the effect on mean PIC concentration over the whole North Atlantic to be less than 1% annually and 2% monthly, but with more significant regional effects, exceeding 10% in peak months in some coastal shelf regions. Effects are highly localized and tend to annually reoccur in similar geographical locations. Ignoring these missing data within intense blooms is likely to result in an underestimation of the influence that coccolithophores, and their changing distributions, are having on the North Atlantic carbon cycle. We see no evidence in this 12-year time series of a temporal poleward movement of these intense bloom events.

Item Type: Publication - Article
Subjects: Biology
Earth Observation - Remote Sensing
Earth Sciences
Marine Sciences
Oceanography
Divisions: Plymouth Marine Laboratory > Science Areas > Earth Observation Science and Applications
Depositing User: Tim Smyth
Date made live: 25 Apr 2018 11:30
Last Modified: 25 Apr 2020 09:58
URI: https://plymsea.ac.uk/id/eprint/7678

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