Monitoring Chinas Coastal Zone and the Adjacent Seas Under Global Change by Satellite Data
Fischer, Jürgen; Kritten, Lena
FU Berlin, GERMANY

China's coastal zone is characterized by it's significant socio-economical implications and the intense human activity. Monitoring of spatio-temporal changes of water quality in order to derive possible impacts from agriculture, industry or global change is the overall goal of this project. Due to the relatively turbid and optically complex waters, the retrieval of water constituents from satellite observations is especially difficult in coastal zones and river deltas. We will introduce a new approach of retrieving inherent optical properties (IOPs, e.g. absorption related to chloropyll-a pigment, yellow substance and detritus, scattering related to a white and a general scatterer) from MERIS level II data by inverting radiative transfer simulations. After applying a bio-optical modell these IOPs can be converted to the concentration of the respective water constituents. The simulations are performed using a new version of the combined ocean-atmosphere radiative transfer code MOMO (Matrix Operator Model), which is based on the matrix operator method and includes polarisation, fluorescence, the dependency of the refractive index of water on salinity and temperature, and the angular resolved effects of water Raman scattering. MOMO can be used to generate reflectance in HJ-1 CCD and MERIS channels representing all optical ranges of the China seas waters, as they are implicated by in situ observations. We will discuss shortcomings of our approach and give a thorough analysis of uncertainties.