The availability of light in the ocean is an important parameter for the determination of phytoplankton photosynthesis processes and primary production from satellite data. It is also a useful parameter for other applications, e.g. the determination of heat fluxes. In this study, a method was developed utilising the vibrational Raman scattering (VRS) effect of water molecules to determine the number of photons available in the...

The composition and abundance of algal pigments provide information on phytoplankton community characteristics such as photoacclimation, overall biomass and taxonomic composition. In particular, pigments play a major role in photoprotection and in the light-driven part of photosynthesis. Most phytoplankton pigments can be measured by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) techniques applied to filtered water samples. Th...

The goal of this study was to improve PhytoDOAS, which is a new retrieval method for quantitative identification of major phytoplankton functional types (PFTs) using hyper-spectral satellite data. PhytoDOAS is an extension of the Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS, a method for detection of atmospheric trace gases), developed for remote identification of oceanic phytoplankton groups. Thus far, PhytoDOAS has bee...

Methods enabling the retrieval of oceanic parameter from the space borne instrumentation Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric ChartographY (SCIAMACHY) using Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) are presented. SCIAMACHY onboard ENVISAT measures back scattered solar radiation at a spectral resolution (0.2 to 1.5 nm). The DOAS method was used for the first time to fit modelled Vibrational Raman...