Performance of JAXA's SGLI standard ocean color products for oceanic to coastal waters: chlorophyll a concentration and light absorption coefficients of colored dissolved organic matter

We present the performance of JAXA's SGLI standard algorithms for estimating chlorophyll a (chl a) concentration and the light absorption coefficients of colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) using recently compiled high-quality data obtained from oceanic to coastal waters. Prior to the evaluation of the algorithms, we first compare two forward models (Gordon et al. in J Geophys Res 93(D9):10909-10924, 1988: G88 and Park and Ruddick in Appl Opt 44(7):1236-1249, 2005: PR05) using a wide range of inherent optical properties (IOPs) to (1) examine if the water reflectance is appropriately reproduced and (2) correct measured reflectance in terms of its bidirectionality. Based on a good reproducibility of water reflectance using the PR05, the optimized IOPs are further used for explaining errors in estimates of chl a concentration and CDOM absorption when using the SGLI, the GSM (Maritorena et al. in Appl Opt 41:2705-2714, 2002), and the QAA (Lee et al. in Appl Opt 41:5755, 2002) inversion algorithms. Results show that the mean error for estimating chl a concentration using the SGLI algorithm is 110% for our dataset. Although this error is lower than that of the GSM and the QAA algorithms, a significant underestimate at chl a higher than 2.0 mg m(-3) is observed, which is further shown by independent match-up analyses. Another SGLI CDOM product includes the mean error of 50% and shows deviation at high CDOM range (> 1.0 m(-1)). A similar trend is observed for the GSM but not for the QAA when a global relationship of CDOM to colored detrital matter is applied. The sources of errors are discussed for potentially improving the retrievals.