Fundamentals of ocean colour remote sensing

Remote sensing refers to collection of information about an object without being in direct contact with the object. Remote sensing aids in measuring remote areas which are inaccessible by any other means and offer less expense than in-situ measurements. Remote sensing facilitates creation of long time series and extended measurement. This has the advantage that several parameters can be measured at same time and satellite-based remote sensing measurements allow global observations. Remote sensing has its own advantages and disadvantages. The limitation includes indirect measurements of large areas which are not of interest to the user. The automated instrument degradation creates retrieval errors and are affected by several factors/processes, and not only by the object of interest. Additional assumptions and models are needed for the interpretation of the measurements and before using these models in oceanographic studies, it is extremely important to validate the performance of the various ocean colour algorithms with in-situ observations (Swirgon et al., 2015)