An optical model for the remote sensing of coloured dissolved organic matter in coastal/ocean waters

An optical model is developed for the remote sensing of coloured dissolved organic matter (CDOM) in a wide range of waters within coastal and open ocean environments. The absorption of CDOM (denoted as a_g) is generally considered as an exponential form model, which has two important parameters – the slope S and absorption of CDOM at a reference wavelength a_g(λ₀). The empirical relationships for deriving these two parameters are established using in-situ bio-optical datasets. These relationships use the spectral remote sensing reflectance (R_rs) ratio at two wavelengths R_rs(670)/R_rs(490), which avoids the known atmospheric correction problems and is sensitive to CDOM absorption and chlorophyll in coastal/ocean waters. This ratio has tight relationships with a_g(412) and a_g(443) yielding correlation coefficients between 0.77 and 0.78. The new model, with the above parameterization applied to independent datasets (NOMAD SeaWiFS match-ups and Carder datasets), shows good retrievals of the a_g(λ) with regression slopes close to unity, little bias and low mean relative and root mean square errors. These statistical estimates improve significantly over other inversion models (e.g., Linear Matrix-LM and Garver-Siegel-Maritorena-GSM semi-analytical models) when applied to the same datasets. These results demonstrate a good performance of the proposed model in both coastal and open ocean waters, which has the potential to improve our knowledge of the biogeochemical cycles and processes in these domains.