Posters

Poster Session 1, Monday,  October  3, 15:40–18:00

Poster 69

Assessing phytoplankton absorption models across freshwater and marine environments

Phytoplankton absorption is a critical optical property that impacts the remote sensing reflectance, and is a key to the underlying plankton community. This property is highly variable, and depends on multiple factors including phytoplankton species, cell size, pigmentation and physiological state. Currently, phytoplankton absorption models incorporated into bio-optical inversion schemes are represented explicitly through several different forms that approximate these factors to varying degrees. Since phytoplankton absorption is critical to inversions, the type of model used will have an important impact on the inversion result and ensuing interpretation. In this work, we assembled hyperspectral phytoplankton absorption measurements from freshwater and marine environments, spanning cyanobacteria blooms, coastal eutrophic and oligotrophic open ocean systems. We assessed existing phytoplankton absorption models across this data set, with the aim of determining whether use of global models are adequate, or if regional models are needed. Further, we developed new models based on specific spectral shapes or eigenvectors which were evaluated against the existing models in the different freshwater and marine systems. This work is preparatory analysis for eventual incorporation and testing of semi-analytic models across the same environmental systems that will be adapted for hyperspectral inversions and applied for upcoming NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud and ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission.

*Ipanema Mora-Carrera, Florida Atlantic University, [email protected]

Timothy Moore, Florida Atlantic University, [email protected] 

Srinivas Kolluru, Florida Atlantic University, [email protected] 

Michael Twardowski, Florida Atlantic University, [email protected]