Regional Products for the Baltic Sea using MERIS Data

Abstract

For many questions of the coastal zone management the knowledge on the biological and ecological state of coastal waters is of high importance. Due to the complexity of this water type, characterized by different classes of water constituents, a sophisticated methodology needs to be applied for quantitative remote sensing. Within the MAPP-Project (MERIS Applications and Regional Products Project) a specific remote sensing interpretation algorithm was developed for the regional assessment of water constituents in the Baltic Sea. This is a part of the ESA Cat-1 proposal ID 1413 GEMEL-3 (“Generation of MERIS Level-3 products for European multidisciplinary regional applications”). The operational implementation in a MERIS-value-adding system allows a near real-time estimation of chlorophyll sediment and gelbstoff concentrations on a regular basis. The algorithm, based on a principal component inversion (PCI) technique and the model will be introduced. Examples of model validation will be demonstrated on a number of comparisons of MERIS reflectances and in-situ measurements. The potential of the model shall be demonstrated on available MERIS data.