The MERIS radiometric and geophysical products are assessed using in situ data collected at the Acqua Alta Oceanographic Tower in the northern Adriatic Sea from May 2002 to May 2003. The analysis is restricted to satellite and in situ data taken within ±1 hour difference to minimize the effects of the spatial and temporal non-homogeneity of atmosphere and sea around the measurement site. The co...

The operational use of MERIS images can be hampered by the presence of clouds. This work presents a cloud screening algorithm that takes advantage of the high spectral and radiometric resolutions of MERIS and the specific location of some of its bands to increase the cloud detection accuracy. Moreover, the proposed algorithm provides a per-pixel probabilistic map of cloud abundance rather than ...

This paper deals with the verification, consistency analysis and potential improvements of the surface pressure product. Pressure determination is based on the absorption in the Oxygen A band and is very sensitive to the spectral characterisation of MERIS. We describe how, thanks to programmable capability of MERIS, the spectral characterisation of MERIS was done using the pressure retrieval an...

Online services provide several Ocean Color datasets for the exploitation of Remote Sensing (RS) applied to marine and coastal areas. Despite the large number of services and data available, end users often require full resolution gridded products at regional scale. In order to provide a higher resolution datasets better suitable for coastal areas analysis and management, an efficient processin...

The Wadden Sea is a shallow coastal sea, interesting because it is a Particular Sensitive Sea Area. It is also optically an interesting area because of mudflats, tidal inlets from the North Sea, discharges from various rivers, great variation in time and space of optically active substances, very high concentrations of optically active substances. Most available optical research was done on one...

Water-leaving radiance with a strong spectral peak at about 705 nm has been noted as a signature of dense surface phytoplankton in bloom conditions. In shallow water, a peak near this wavelength can also indicate the presence of benthic vegetation. MERIS on Envisat provides a band at 709 nm which can be used to detect this signature. We present images and spectra derived from MERIS image data o...

The objectives of this study were firstly to validate the standard MERIS data products for coastal waters (Case 2) after the improvements done in the 2 processing, and secondly to test the performance of the FUB and Case2R processors. Validation was performed for data between 2002 and 2007. The in situ data were mainly collected by a Ferrybox system onboard MS Color Festival between Norway and ...

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) is a powerful technology for observing the Earth surface, especially for mapping the Earth's topography and deformations. InSAR measurements are however often significantly affected by the atmosphere as the radar signals propagate through the atmosphere whose state varies both in space and in time. Great efforts have been made in recent years to ...

Understanding the long-term performance of global satellite leaf area index (LAI) products is important for global change research. However, few effort has been devoted to evaluating the long-term time-series consistencies of LAI products. This study compared four long-term LAI products (GLASS, GLOBMAP, LAI3g, and TCDR) in terms of trends, interannual variabilities, and uncertainty variations f...

In this paper we present an aerosol retrieval over land algorithm specifically designed for the ENVISAT MERIS sensor, with the aim of the atmospheric correction of the data. The fundamental basis lies on a multiple parameter inversion for spectrally heterogeneous sets of five pixels in a window inside the image, considering invariant the atmosphere in this window. In the modellization of the To...