A brief description of the project you will be undertaking written so that high school students can understand it. Phytoplankton, the microscopic plants of the ocean, are the basis of the marine food web, all life in the sea, and they play an important role in the global biogeochemical cycles.
Ocean waters vary from deep marine blue to a more turbid green color.
Deep marine blue is the color of sea water itself, which becomes increasingly green as the concentration of phytoplankton suspended in the water increases. This principle, blue for low biomass and increasingly green for higher biomass concentrations, is used by the SeaWiFS ocean color satellite sensor for the estimation from space of oceanic chlorophyll, a measure of phytoplankton biomass. The overall objectives and the basic principles of this project are relatively simple. The actual implementation of receiving a satellite signal in space, relating it to a water leaving reflectance, and linking that reflectance to the in-water chlorophyll concentration requires attention to a number of important details. The final output will be calibrated satellite images of the abundance and distribution of phytoplankton biomass for the Palmer region and the Southern Ocean.