Speaker: Mike Behrenfeld, Professor, Dept of Botany and Plant Pathology, OSU

Topic: Building toward a new Lidar Era in satellite oceanography

Since the late 1970’s, satellite observations have profoundly influenced our understanding of global ocean ecosystems.  The retrieval of plankton properties from space has almost entirely been based on a technique known as passive ocean color measurements.  This technique quantifies variations in the water leaving reflectance spectrum of sunlight and it relates these variations to properties such as phytoplankton chlorophyll concentration and carbon biomass.  While providing a revolution in global oceanography, the passive ocean color approach has significant and long-recognized limitations.  Key among these are its very limited depth penetration, failed retrievals at low sun angles, susceptibility to contamination from light scattering by clouds, and inability to measure plankton properties at night.  The Light Detection and Ranging (LiDaR) technique provides a complementary approach for ocean remote sensing that addresses these issues, but its application has largely been restricted to ship and airborne platforms.  In this presentation, I will discuss recent developments regarding the feasibility of plankton retrievals with a satellite LiDaR and some of the new ecological insights afforded by this approach.  This research is aimed at building a solid scientific foundation for a future ocean-optimized satellite LiDaR mission.    

Link: https://oregonstate.zoom.us/j/94555731151?pwd=RnJ6eVg0ODdzRUpVc0pQbUlIdUV3dz09