Remote sensing of phytoplankton communities
Understanding distributions of phytoplankton on large scales leads to insights on marine food webs, carbon and nutrient cycles and fluxes, and how these processes are evolving in a rapidly changing ocean. We use optical measurements to uncover relationships between the color and brightness of the water and phytoplankton communities. In turn, these relationships enable us to scale up our observations to measurements made by Earth-observing satellites. Current work is focused on algorithm development to estimate phytoplankton pigments and diatom carbon concentrations from remote sensing observations.
Diatom carbon biomass estimated from NASA’s MODIS satellite data
This is an especially exciting time to be exploring phytoplankton from space, thanks to the recent launch (Feb 2024) of the NASA PACE Mission. Below are two recent videos created by the communications team at APL highlighting the work we do in support of the PACE mission.
Validation of NASA’s PACE satellite mission
Recently (Feb 2024), NASA launched the Plankton Aerosol Cloud ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, which will provide novel high-spectral resolution ocean color and polarimetry measurements, on a daily global basis. Numerous scientific products will be derived from these measurements, and an important step in the process of conducting science with satellite-based data is validation of remote sensing measurements against measurements made from ships. During 2024-2026, we are participating in this effort via our NASA-funded “Ships of Opportunity for PACE (SO-PACE)” project, which involves making optical and phytoplankton community measurements around the world on opportunistic research vessels. Stay tuned for more info and pictures from this work!
Phytoplankton community dynamics in the Salish Sea
The southern Salish Sea, including the eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and all of Puget Sound, is a highly productive and dynamic estuarine system. It is also changing dramatically as a result of anthropogenic influences, and climate change. The Washington Ocean Acidification Center (WOAC) supports and directs numerous research efforts related to the changing waters in the Washington region, including a time series of data collection for various environmental and biological parameters in the southern Salish Sea. Since 2014, 5-day research cruises take place three times per year (spring, summer, and fall). During these cruises, water samples are collected and laboratory analyses are conducted to measure parameters including nutrients, carbonate chemistry (related to ocean acidification), the abundance of different types of phytoplankton, and the abundance of different zooplankton (critters that eat phytoplankton). With funding support from WOAC, our lab group is involved with analysis of the phytoplankton samples, both to process and interpret the data.
Collecting water samples from the CTD Niskin rosette
Productive green waters in the south Puget Sound
Station location for phytoplankton & environmental parameter sampling throughout the southern Salish Sea
Development of software tools for analyzing large plankton image datasets
