Applications of Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) observations

Ocean color remote-sensing technique opened a new era for biological oceanography by providing the global distribution of phytoplankton biomass every a few days. It has been proved useful for a variety of applications in coastal waters as well as oceanic waters. However, most ocean color sensors deliver less than one image per day for low and middle latitude areas, and this once a day image is insufficient to resolve transient or high frequency processes. Korean Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI), the first ever ocean color instrument operated on geostationary orbit, is collecting ocean color radiometry (OCR) data (multi-band radiances at the visible to NIR spectral wavelengths) since July, 2010. GOCI has an unprecedented capability to provide eight OCR images a day with a 500m resolution for the North East Asian seas

Monitoring the spatial and temporal variability is important to understand many processes occurring in open ocean and coastal environments. With a series of images consecutively acquired by GOCI, we are now able to look into (sub-)diurnal variabilities of coastal ocean color products such as phytoplankton biomass, suspended particles concentrations, and primary production. The eight images taken a day provide another way to derive maps of ocean current velocity. Compared to polar orbiters, GOCI delivers more frequent images with constant viewing angle, which enables to better monitor and thus respond to coastal water issues such as harmful algal blooms, floating green and brown algae. The frequent observation capability for local area allows us to respond timely to natural disasters and hazards. GOCI images are often useful to identify sea fog, sea ice, wild fires, volcanic eruptions, transport of dust aerosols, snow covered area, etc.