Bringing the Ocean into Finer Focus at the Land-Sea Interface through the NASA COAST, HyspIRI, and OCEANIA Suborbital Missions

Sherry L Palacios, Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, sherry.l.palacios@nasa.gov (Presenter)
Liane Guild, NASA ARC, liane.s.guild@nasa.gov
Raphael Kudela, UCSC, kudela@ucsc.edu
Stanford B. Hooker, NASA GSFC, stanford.b.hooker@nasa.gov
John Morrow, Biospherical Instruments Inc., morrow@biospherical.com
Phil Russell, NASA ARC, philip.b.russell@nasa.gov
John Livingston, SRI/NASA ARC, john.m.livingston@nasa.gov
Kendra Negrey, UCSC, khayashi@ucsc.edu
Juan Luis Torres-Pérez, Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, juan.l.torresperez@nasa.gov
Meloe Kacenelenbogen, Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, meloe.s.kacenelenbogen@nasa.gov
Kirk Knobelspiesse, NASA ARC, kirk.d.knobelspiesse@nasa.gov

Ecological functioning of the coastal zone is strongly influenced by inputs from land and interactions with the shallow benthos. Monterey Bay, CA is highly productive and lies within the California Current System. It is characterized by extensive algal blooms driven by seasonal coastal upwelling, harmful algal blooms, and episodic inputs from terrestrial run-off. High-quality ocean color measurements and algorithms are needed to characterize water quality in these typically Case 2 waters to estimate chlorophyll-a, energy transfer, and phytoplankton biodiversity. Accurate ocean color retrievals nearshore are often confounded by inadequate atmospheric correction. The recent NASA COAST, HyspIRI, and OCEANIA suborbital missions have used novel instruments in a multi-sensor, multi-platform approach to collect above- and in-water measurements to better characterize ocean color through improvements in instrument dynamic range and attention to atmospheric correction. High-level objectives of these missions are to characterize the coastal ocean through end-to-end assessment of image acquisition, atmospheric correction, algorithm application, and sea-truth observations to improve vicarious calibration and validation of satellite ocean color products. We present results from COAST, HyspIRI, and OCEANIA to demonstrate the importance of coincident atmospheric and sea-truth measurements to improve atmospheric correction. Our specific objective was to conduct a sensitivity analysis of the atmospheric correction algorithm, Tafkaa, for correction of imaging spectrometer data using input parameters of atmospheric aerosol optical depth spectra and column water vapor obtained from the Ames Airborne Tracking Sunphotometer (AATS-14) collected on the CIRPAS Twin Otter during COAST (2011). Use of the high dynamic-range, in-water Compact-Optical Profiling System (C-OPS) and above-water Coastal Airborne In-situ Radiometers (C-AIR) with matched wavelength channels enabled accurate observations of exact water-leaving radiance to validate imagery. Knowledge gained from these missions will improve vicarious calibration and validation of legacy (MODIS) and future (PACE & GEO-CAPE) satellite sensors to better characterize coastal ecosystems using ocean color observations.

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  Theme 2: Landscapes to coasts: understanding Earth system connections   (Mon 1:30 PM)

Associated Project(s): 

• Kudela, Raphael: Using HyspIRI at the Land/Sea Interface to Identify Phytoplankton Functional Types ...details

Poster Location ID: 106