MerisValidation - Technical Assistance for the Validation of Meris Marine Products at Several European Coastal Basis

The present document addresses the validation of MERIS marine products at the following European basins: the Adriatic Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. The rational for a basin-specific analysis is the difficulty to achieve the same accuracy when deriving optically-active seawater compounds in coastal and open ocean waters. The planned investigation will start identifying in-situ data to evaluate primary MERIS radiometric measurements and derived ocean color (OC) products in the considered coastal regions. In the applicable cases, MERIS primary radiometric data will be validated with field measurements generated by the AERONET-OC network (accessible under a specific data policy). Data collected in the Bio-Optical Data Set of Marine Properties (BiOMaP) produced by the Joint Research Center (JRC) of EU, Italy (and accessible within the framework of specific collaborations) are candidate measurements to create basin-specific neural network inversion schemes for comparison with MERIS OC products. Complementary validation analysis will be undertaken with the NASA Bio-Optical Marine Data Set (NOMAD). This database is at the basis of the bio-optical modeling of current ocean color NASA missions and represents a valuable benchmark case study. The regional nature of the investigated problem requires the development of a statistical scheme to identify the range of applicability of the proposed biogeochemical algorithms, as well as a blending scheme to derive ocean color products from different regional and global algorithms without introducing discontinuities in the final map. Besides, MERIS OC product maps are currently distributed without information about the reliability of each pixel. Scope of the work is then to investigate models for predicting the accuracy of OC products on a pixel-by-pixel basis. The devised methodologies will be applied to MERIS level 2 reflectances for comparisons based on individual images and/or level 3 monthly composites. Applicable numerical solutions will be delivered as modules to be plugged in the BEAM software operationally used for the processing of MERIS data.

Funding entity: European Space Agency.

Reference: C22576

Funding: 100.000.

Principal Investigator

Creation of the database for implementing bio-geochemical algorithms for remote sensing applications