Comparing the ocean color measurements between MOS and SeaWiFS: a vicarious intercalibration approach for MOS

The modular optoelectronic scanner (MOS) is a German instrument that was launched in the spring of 1996 on the Indian IRS-P3 satellite. With the successful launch of NASA’s Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) in the summer of 1997, there are now two ocean color missions in concurrent operation, and there is interest within the scientific community to compare data from these two sensors. In this paper, we describe our efforts to retrieve ocean-optical properties from both SeaWiFS and MOS using consistent methods. We first briefly review the atmospheric correction, which removes more than 90% of the observed radiances in the visible, and then we describe how the atmospheric-correction algorithm used for the SeaWiFS data can be modified for application to other ocean color sensors. Next, since the retrieved water-leaving radiances in the visible between MOS and SeaWiFS are significantly different, we developed a vicarious intercalibration method to recalibrate the MOS spectral bands based on the optical properties of the ocean and atmosphere derived from the coincident SeaWiFS measurements. Furthermore, because of the strange calibration behavior of the MOS 750 nm band, we modified the atmospheric correction such that the MOS 685 and 868 nm bands can also be used. We present and discuss the MOS-retrieved, ocean-optical properties before and after the vicarious calibration using both the MOS 685 and 750 nm coupled with 868 nm bands in comparison with results from SeaWiFS and demonstrate the efficacy of this approach. We show that it is possible and efficient to vicariously intercalibrate sensors between one and another.