Ocean color measured from satellites provides daily global estimates of marine inherent optical properties (IOPs). The IOPs refer to absorption and backscattering of the water. The IOPs of natural waters are the most significant factors affecting light propagation within water columns, and thus play indispensable roles on estimation of aquatic biomass, primary production, and carbon pools.
While numerous IOPs retrieval model exist, most are similarly constructed and few are appropriately parameterized for all water masses (inland, clear, turbid, shallow and deep) for all seasons.
For shallow and turbid regions like Arabian Gulf, IOPs-based model is often preferred for estimating chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentration over empirical and some semi-empirical algorithms. However, IOPs have never been studied in the Arabian Gulf and yet uncharacterized.
Therefore, the objective of this project is to develop a satellite based model for estimating both IOPs and Chl-a and understanding the bio-optical properties of these waters.
Open source ocean color satellite data such as MODIS, VIIRS, LandSat, and Sentinel will be used. To validate the performance of the developed model and make it robust, in situ measurements of IOPs have to be collected in this region.
