A Study on Extending Successive Observation Coverage of MODIS Ocean Color Product

Abstract

In the processing of ocean color remote sensing data, spatio-temporal binning is crucial for securing effective observation area. The validity determination for given source data refers to the information in Level-2 flag. For minimizing the stray light contamination, NASA OBPG's standard algorithm suggests the use of large filtering window but it results in the loss of effective observation area. This study is aimed for quality improvement of ocean color remote sensing data by recovering/extending the portion of effective observation area. We analyzed the difference between MODIS/Aqua standard and modified product in terms of chlorophyll-a concentration, spatial and temporal coverage. The recovery fractions in Level-2 swath product, Level-3 daily composite product, 8-day composite product, and monthly composite product were 13.2(±5.2)%, 30.8(±16.3)%, 15.8(±9.2)%, and 6.0(±5.6)%, respectively. The mean difference between chlorophyll-a concentrations of two products was only 0.012%, which is smaller than the nominal precision of the geophysical parameter estimation. Increase in areal coverage also results in the increase in temporal density of multi-temporal dataset, and this processing gain was most effective in 8-day composite data. The proposed method can contribute for the quality enhancement of ocean color remote sensing data by improving not only the data productivity but also statistical stability from increased number of samples.