The Need for a Global Ocean Chlorophyll Fluorescence Product from MERIS
Gower, Jim1; King, Stephanie2; Young, Erika3
1Institute of Ocean Sciences, CANADA; 2Sea This Consulting, CANADA; 3University of Victoria, CANADA

We discuss and show examples of a possible level 3 global MERIS FLH product, for new insight into coastal productivity and blooms in coastal areas. The MODIS fluorescence product is made widely available through the NASA Oceancolor and Giovanni web systems, but there are problems, especially with normalization, and it does not appear to be widely used in regional studies. For fluorescence imaging, MERIS has the technical advantage over MODIS of better band placing (including the additional 709 nm band) and of higher spatial resolution (300m compared to 1000m). In western Canada, we have used fluorescence images from both MERIS and MODIS to detect a new pattern of blooms indicating seeding of the spring bloom from deep, glacial inlets. We find that such blooms are much easier to detect using fluorescence rather than standard chlorophyll products based on blue and green wavelengths. We suspect there are many undiscovered applications of satellite-measured fluorescence in ocean, and especially coastal, waters. More work needs to be done on the global MERIS FLH time series to demonstrate and refine future products from OLCI.