A NEW METHOD OF MASKING CLOUD-AFFECTED PIXELS IN OCEAN COLOR IMAGERY BASED ON SPECTRAL SHAPE OF WATER REFLECTANCE

  • Published : 2006.11.02

Abstract

We propose a new method of masking cloud-affected pixels in satellite ocean color imageries such as of GLI. Those pixels, mostly found around cloud pixels or in scattered cloud area, have anomalous features in either in chlorophyll-a estimate or in water reflectance. This artifact is most likely caused by residual error of inter-band registration correction. Our method is to check the pixel-wise 'soundness' of the spectral water reflectance Rw retrieved after the atmospheric correction. First, we define two spectral ratio between water reflectance, IRR1 and IRR2, each defined as RW(B1)/RW (B3) RW (B3) and as RW (B2)/RW(B4) respectively, where $B1{\sim}B4$ stand for 4 consecutive visible bands. We show that an almost linear relation holds over log-scaled IRR1 and IRR2 for shipmeasured RW data of SeaBAM in situ data set and for GLI cloud-free Level 2 sub-scenes. The method we propose is to utilize this nature, identifying those pixels that show significant discrepancy from that relationship. We apply this method to ADEOS-II/GLI ocean color data to evaluate the performance over Level-2 data, which includes different water types such as case 1, turbid case 2 and coccolithophore bloom waters.

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