Conference Agenda

The coastal ocean plays a critical role in the ocean carbon cycle, yet our current understanding of the different pools and fluxes of organic carbon is limited by strong local dynamics, which requires high spatial and temporal resolution of observations covering relatively large areas across the shelf seas. Satellite remote sensing of carbon pools and fluxes at high spatial resolution and daily frequency can cover this gap in observations, but new algorithms need to be developed and validated.

In the ESA project “Carbon from earth Observation between Ocean and Land (COOL)”, we aim to estimate carbon pools and fluxes for which algorithms are relatively mature, and hence we can have some certainty in their application in the coastal ocean at the global scale in the near future. These include Particulate Organic Carbon (POC), Particulate Inorganic Carbon (PIC), Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) and Primary Production (PP). Using data from Sentinel-3 OLCI at 300 m resolution and Sentinel-2 MSI at 60 m, we aim to produce an internally consistent coastal ocean carbon satellite dataset in selected European coastal regions. We make use of in situ datasets for evaluation and validation of these satellite products and investigate the newly produced Earth Observation datasets in the Baltic Sea and in the upwelling areas of the western Gallican coast, northwest Spain.