The interaction of light with phytoplankton in the marine environment

In many regions of the ocean, the phytoplankton population dominates both the attenuation and scattering of light. In other regions, non-phytoplankton contributions to the absorption and scattering may change the remote sensing reflectance and thus affect the ability to interpret remotely sensed ocean color. Hence, variations in the composition of both the phytoplankton population and of the non-phytoplankton material in the water can affect the optical properties of the sea. The effects of these contributions to the remote sensing reflectance and the submarine light field are modeled using scattering and absorption measurements of phytoplankton cultures obtained at the Friday Harbor Laboratory of the University of Washington. These measurements are used to develop regional chlorophyll algorithms specific to the summer waters of Puget Sound for the Coastal Zone Color Scanner, Thematic Mapper and future Ocean Color Imager, and their accuracies are compared for high chlorophyll waters with little or no Gelbstoff, but with variable detrital and suspended material.