A case study of red tide detection around Korean waters using satellite remote sensing

Korea has experienced 10 a Cochlodinium polykrikoides red tide outbreaks during the last 10 years (1993-2002). The monitoring activities at National Fisheries Research and Development Institute (NFRDI) in Korea have been extended to all the coastal waters after the worst of fish killing by C. polykrikoides blooms in 1995. NFRDI is looking forward to finding out the feasibility of red tide detection around Korean waters using satellite remote sensing of NOAA/AVHRR, Orbview-2/SeaWiFS, IRS-P4/OCM and Terra/MODIS on real time base. In this study, we used several alternative methods including climatological analysis, spectral and optical methods which may offer a potential detection of the major species of red tide in Korean waters. The relationship between the distribution of SST and C. polykrikoides bloom areas was studied. In climatological analysis, NOAA, SeaWiFS, OCM satellite data in 20th and 26th August 2001 were chosen using the known C. polykrikoides red tide bloom area mapped by helicopter reconnaissance and ground observation. The 26th August, 2001 SeaWiFS chlorophyll a anomaly imageries against the imageries of non-occurring red tide for August 20, 2001 showed the areas C. polykrikoides occurred. The anomalies of chlorophyll a concentration from satellite data between before and after red tide outbreaks showed the similar distribution of C. polykrikoides red tide in 26th August, 2001. The distribution of the difference in SST between daytime and nighttime also showed the possibility of red tide detection. We used corrected vegetation index (CVI) to detect floating vegetation and submerged vegetation containing algal blooms. The simple result of optical absorption from C. polykrikoides showed that if we use the optical characteristics of each red tide we will be able to get the feasibility of the red tide detection.