Bio-Optical Characterization and Ocean Colour Inversion in the Eastern Lagoon of New Caledonia, South Tropical Pacific

A study on the Eastern Lagoon of New Caledonia (ELNC) reveals significant variability in bio-optical properties, with coastal stations dominated by non-algal particles and coloured dissolved organic matter due to allochthonous sources. The research found that existing ocean colour algorithms, including empirical and semi-analytical models, showed high biases in estimating chlorophyll a concentration (Chla), particularly at coastal sites. However, the GSM01 algorithm performed best for Chla retrievals with 35–40% relative percent differences when excluding these stations. Additionally, algorithms for detecting absorption slopes of coloured dissolved organic matter plus non-algal particles and particle backscattering coefficients showed reasonable accuracy (~18% and ~40% RPD, respectively). The study highlights the potential of satellite monitoring to track water quality in the ELNC, provided atmospheric correction is accurate, and suggests that regionally tuned algorithms could improve future Chla estimates. The findings underscore the need for better parameterization schemes to account for spatiotemporal variability in specific inherent optical properties.

Favareto, L. R., Rudorff, N., Kampel, M., Frouin, R., Röttgers, R., Doxaran, D., Murakami, H., & Dupouy, C. (2018). Bio-Optical Characterization and Ocean Colour Inversion in the Eastern Lagoon of New Caledonia, South Tropical Pacific. Remote Sensing, 10(7), 1043. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10071043