Spaceborne ocean color sensors require vicarious calibration to sea-truth data to achieve accurate water-leaving radiance retrievals. The assumed requirements of an in situ data set necessary to achieve accurate vicarious calibration were set forth in a series of papers and reports developed nearly a decade ago, which were embodied in the development and site location of the Marine Optical BuoY...

Using an optimization technique, we derived subsurface properties of coastal and oceanic waters from measured remote-sensing reflectance spectra. These data included both optically deep and shallow environments. The measured reflectance covered a spectral range from 400 to 800 nm. The inversions used data from each 5-, 10-, and 20-nm contiguous bands, including Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Se...

An advanced multivariate sequential data assimilation system has been implemented within the framework of the European MFSTEP project to fit a three-dimensional biogeochemical model of the Eastern Mediterranean to satellite chlorophyll data from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-ofview Sensor (SeaWiFS). The physics are described by the Princeton Ocean Model (POM) while the biochemistry of the ecosyste...

[1] We study freshwater discharge from the Amazon River into the tropical Atlantic using monthly mean multi-sensor data from September 1997 to July 2003. In order to demonstrate freshwater discharge, we used chlorophyll concentration (Chl_a) and diffuse attenuation coefficient (DAC) measured by the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), and salt steric height anomaly (DhS) derived fro...

The Polar Front Zone (PFZ) in the Barents Sea is an area where warm, salty water of the North Atlantic (AtW) interacts with cold, less dense, Arctic water (ArW) and the fresher water produced by melting ice (MW). In the spring a large-scale transformation of the structure of the PFZ is accompanied by the development of mesoscale eddies with characteristic sizes of 25 to 40 km. The vertical velo...