Satellite retrieval of oceanic particulate organic carbon: Towards an accurate and seamless dataset for the global ocean

Abstract

Particulate organic carbon (POC) plays crucial roles in the global ocean carbon cycle and the oceanic biological pump. Satellite remote sensing has been demonstrated to be an effective technique for the retrieval of surface oceanic POC concentration. However, the complex spatiotemporal variations of the relationships between POC and oceanic optical properties across different waters posed challenges for accurate retrieval of POC concentration from satellite observations. Additionally, interference factors, such as cloud cover and sun glint, resulted in severe data missing problems and impeding daily coverage of the global ocean. With an attempt to generate accurate, seamless and readily available POC products for the global ocean, this study aimed to develop accurate satellite POC retrieval models for the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data from both Terra and Aqua satellites, and to explore the possibility of using the empirical orthogonal function interpolation technique (DINEOF) to reconstruct satellite-retrieved POC data to generate gap-free global oceanic POC products. Results showed that the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) method could accurately retrieve POC with R² approximately 0.80 and RMSE about 0.20 in log10 scale, obviously outperforming the operational blue-to-green band ratio algorithm and the hybrid polynomial algorithm based on two multi-band indices; and the DINEOF method, which could reconstruct approximately 88 % missing pixels for the global ocean, contributed to better revealing the global oceanic POC variations at a daily scale than the satellite-retrieved POC products. Based on the developed models, a suit of long time-series accurate and seamless POC products of the global surface ocean were generated, which is readily available for other applications and should be helpful to investigate the spatiotemporal variations of POC concentrations over global ocean and its roles in the global carbon cycle. The generated seamless products are openly accessible via the DOIs listed in the data availability section.