Estimation of Chlorophyll Concentration for Environment Monitoring in Scottish Marine Water

Marine Scotland is tasked with reporting on the environmental status of Scottish marine waters, an enormous area of water extending from the shoreline to deep oceanic waters. As one of the most important variables, chlorophyll concentration (Chl) plays an important role in the seawater quality monitoring. Currently, the Chl observation is mostly done by expensive ship-based surveys that have very limited spatio-temporal coverage. Satellite based ocean colour remote sensing has the potential to significantly enhance monitoring capabilities but this opportunity has not been widely adopted by statutory reporting bodies across Europe due to concerns over satellite data quality. To break through this bottleneck, in this paper, we explore to implement advanced machine learning techniques to automatically estimate the Chl via the historic time series of ocean colour remote sensing data during from July 2002 to September 2019.