Atmospheric correction of geostationary ocean color imager data over turbid coastal waters under high solar zenith angles

Abstract

The traditional atmospheric correction models employed with the near-infrared iterative schemes inaccurately estimate aerosol radiance at high solar zenith angles (SZAs), leading to a substantial loss of valid products for dawn or dusk observations by the geostationary satellite ocean color sensor. To overcome this issue, we previously developed an atmospheric correction model suitable for open ocean waters observed by the first geostationary satellite ocean color imager (GOCI) under high SZAs. This model was constructed based on a dataset from stable open ocean waters, which makes it less suitable for coastal waters. In this study, we developed a specialized atmospheric correction model (GOCI-II-NN) capable of accurately retrieving the water-leaving radiance from GOCI-II observations in coastal oceans under high SZAs. We utilized multiple observations from GOCI-II throughout the day to develop the selection criteria for extracting the stable coastal water pixels and created a new training dataset for the proposed model. The performance of the GOCI-II-NN model was validated by in-situ data collected from coastal/shelf waters. The results showed an Average Percentage Difference (APD) of less than 23% across the entire visible spectrum. In terms of the valid data and retrieval accuracy, the GOCI-II-NN model was superior to the traditional near-infrared and ultraviolet atmospheric correction models in terms of accurately retrieving the ocean color products for various applications, such as tracking/monitoring of algal blooms, sediment dynamics, and water quality among other applications.