Bringing the coastal zone into finer focus guild

Further, remote sensing of benthic ecosystems and shallow sub-surface phenomena are challenged by the requirements to sense through the sea surface and through a water column with varying light conditions from the open ocean to the waterвЂ™s edge. This remote sensing resolution challenge thwarts the advancement of research in the coastal zone. In order to obtain data at the land/sea interface, finer spatial resolution satellite data can be achieved yet spectral resolution is sacrificed. In many standard satellite products, these coastal mixed pixels are masked out because they confound algorithms for the ocean color parameter suite. The delineation of natural phenomena do not fit nicely into gridded pixels and the coastal zone is complicated by mixed pixels at the land-sea interface with a range of bio-optical signals from terrestrial and water components. For example, river plumes and algal blooms have typical extents of 10s of meters and therefore can be resolved with satellite data, however, shallow benthic ecosystem (e.g., coral, seagrass, and kelp) biodiversity and change are best studied at resolutions of submeter to meter, below the pixel size of typical satellite products. Various coastal ocean phenomena operate at different scales (e.g. Measurements over extents from submeter to 10s of meters are critical science requirements for the design and integration of remote sensing instruments for coastal zone research.

Bringing the coastal zone into finer focus guild