Moore, Tim: Florida Atlantic University (Project Lead)
Project Funding:
2015 - 2017
NRA: 2014 NASA: Earth Science U.S. Participating Investigator
Funded by NASA
Abstract:
The European Space Agency (ESA) has maintained an active and strong commitment to ocean remote sensing observations for environmental and climate change monitoring for several decades starting with the European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellite, ERS-1, launched in 1991. ESA’s Sentinel program comprises a series of satellites to replace the current older Earth observation missions, which have reached retirement or have ended.
The Sentinel program will involve the launch of a half a dozen satellites, which began with the launch of Sentinel-1 in April 2014. Of these Sentinel-series missions, the primary mission of the Sentinel-3 satellite (planned launch in 2015) will be on the oceans, and will include a passive radiometer for ocean color earth observations-the Ocean and Land Color Imager (OLCI). OLCI is a medium-resolution imaging spectrometer that will be used to provide data continuity for ENVISAT's now-defunct MERIS instrument, which ended its mission in 2012. OLCI will be similar in spectral specification and spatial coverage to the MERIS sensor.
The development of EU-funded working groups and projects that will use Sentinel-3 data are under way in anticipation of its launch in 2015. This includes the Global Lakes Sentinel Services (GLaSS) project headed by Water Insight (Netherlands) and Brockmann Consult (Germany) that will develop new tools and methods for data sets from Sentinel satellites into information for lake water management (http://www.glass- project.eu/). One of the tools produced from GLaSS will be an optical classification module using ocean color data for water quality monitoring. For this purpose, GLaSS has

adopted the method of Moore et al. (2014a) for developing water quality products and tools for monitoring coastal and lake ecosystems. This approach focuses on the classification of ocean color imagery specific for lake environments for improved algorithm products.
ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) is a EU-funded project (http://www.esa-cci.org/) to develop and generate climate-quality satellite data sets for Essential Climate Variables (ECVs). The ECVs will be derived from multiple satellite data sets from European and international agencies, and include specific information on the errors and uncertainties of the data sets. The Ocean Colour CCI project focuses on the ECVs encompassing water- leaving radiance in the visible domain, derived chlorophyll and inherent optical properties and will utilize satellite data from ESA (MERIS, Sentinel-3) and NASA (SeaWiFS, MODIS). This project uses a system developed by Moore et al. (2009) for the generation of pixel-by-pixel uncertainties for a broad range of ocean color products, including chlorophyll, spectral reflectance and absorption products.
I am currently a non-European member of the CCI Earth Observation Science Team. I am also a non-European member the GLaSS team. This proposal seeks modest support for continuing these collaborative efforts for the next few years on these two EU-funded projects, both of which will be using ocean color data from the planned Sentinel-2 and -3 satellites, as well as data from the current NASA MODIS-Aqua. These two projects have adopted approaches and methods of Moore et al (2009, 2014a, 2014b) for ocean color product uncertainty, and for lake water quality product development.
This proposal addresses several of NASA’s key science themes (Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems, and Climate Variability and Change), and the collaborative efforts will result in new ocean color tools that should easily translate to the planned NASA ocean color PACE mission for water quality monitoring and uncertainty quantification.
More details may be found in the following project profile(s):
