Previous principal component analyses of ocean color absorption coefficient spectra have shown the variation in these data is captured by a few eigenfunctions. Here, we perform an unsupervised, non‐negative matrix factorization (NMF) of to derive their fundamental and physically interpretable modes. When applied independently to two large datasets—one semi‐empirical and one from inline measurements of the Tara Microbiome exped...

The proliferation of easily accessible machine learning algorithms and their apparent successes at inference and classification in computer vision and the sciences has motivated their increased adoption in ocean remote sensing. Our field, however, runs the risk of developing these models on limited training datasets—with sparse geographical and temporal sampling or ignoring the real data dimensionality—thereby constructing ove...