Visible and infrared remote sensing of the White Sea bio-geo-chemistry and hydrology

Abstract

A new operational non-satellite-specific algorithm for a Simul taneous retrieval of contents of phytoplankton chlorophyll (chl), suspended minerals (sm) and dissolved organic carbon (doc) from space sensor data, was employed to monitor the surface expressions of some biotic and abiotic processes in the White Sea (WS). A special technique has been de-veloped to reconstruct the seasonal variations of the above substances in pixels occasionally masked by cloudiness. The developed software package provided a means to obtain the series of intra-annual spatial and temporal variations of chl, sm, doc and sea surface temperature throughout the WS from SeaWiFS and AVHRR, respectively. The observed variations are controlled by (a) the dynamics of water turbidity and opacity due to seasonal variations in the content of sm and doc driven by the river discharge varying influence, and (b) thermo-hydrodynamic processes encompassing water density currents, tides, upwellings, fronts, etc. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.