Retrieval of oceanic primary production using support vector machines

One of the most important tasks of ocean color observations is to determine the distribution of phytoplankton primary production. A variety of bio-optical algorithms have been developed estimate primary production from these parameters. In this communication, we investigated the possibility of using a novel universal approximator-support vector machines (SVMs)-as the nonlinear transfer function between oceanic primary production and the information that can be directly retrieved from satellite data. The VGPM (Vertically Generalized Production Model) dataset was used to evaluate the proposed approach. The PPARR2 (Primary Production Algorithm Round Robin 2) dataset was used to further compare the precision between the VGPM model and the SVM model. Using this SVM model to calculate the global ocean primary production, the result is 45.5 PgC $yr^{-1}$, which is a little higher than the VGPM result.