Son, Seung-Hyun, Janet Campbell, Mark Dowell and Timothy Moore

Ocean Process Analysis Laboratory, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, Tel: 603-862-1348, Fax: 603-862-0243, E-mail: shson@darkstar.sr.unh.edu

Decadal and inter-annual variations in the Yellow and East China Seas revealed by Satellite Ocean Color Data (1979 – 2002)

It is important to combine historical and current ocean color data for the study of long term variations due to climate change in the ecological environments of the ocean. Satellite ocean color data, from the Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS) for the period January 1979 to June 1986 and the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) for the period September 1997 to December 2002, are examined to investigate decadal trends and inter-annual variation in the Yellow and East China Seas (YECS). The main goal is to investigate whether there have been significant changes in the ocean productivity or optical properties during the past several decades in the YECS.

First, the water-leaving radiance and chlorophyll concentrations of CZCS and SeaWiFS processed by the standard algorithms are compared. Then, we merge the data into a long-term time series and a unified bio-optical algorithm is derived to convert level-2 CZCS pigments to SeaWiFS chlorophyll concentrations. This conversion is applied to level-2 CZCS data, and the chlorophyll and water leaving radiance of monthly composite, full-resolution images are compared. In-situ temperature, salinity, and transparency data (1969-2001), and zooplankton data (1978-1996) which is bi-monthly measured by the Korea Oceanographic Data Center (KODC) are also compared for decadal trends.