Marine coastal zones monitoring by shipborne semiautomatic passive optical complex

For studying of the environmental status of marine coastal areas, it is often necessary to obtain operatively detailed data about water constituents and their distribution over the area. The three-channel passive optical complex for Ecological Monitoring of Marine Areas (EMMA), developed by us, was applied in the Feodosia Bay, the Black Sea, to obtain remotely the absorption indices for the suspended matter, coloured dissolved organic matter, and phytoplankton pigments. It operated from board a vessel for more than 4 h and gave data for approximately 15,000 sea radiance coefficient spectra. The obtained spectra were processed by the original method giving possibility to suppress negative influence of the weather and experiment conditions and to get the absorption index spectra of the water constituents. The data of shipborne remote sensing using EMMA were compared to the estimates retrieved from the measurements on water samples taken at special stations on the route; their correlation turned out to be quite reasonable. The distributions of the suspended matter and coloured organic matter, obtained remotely over the studied area, were discussed. This research showed the possibility of EMMA application for ground truth measurements and for exploring the sea areas close to the coastal line, which cannot be seen from satellites because of cloudiness.