Assessment of GOCI radiometric products using MERIS, MODIS and field measurements

The first Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) launched by South Korea in June 2010 constitutes a major breakthrough in marine optics remote-sensing for its capabilities to observe the diurnal cycles of the ocean. The light signal recorded at eight wavelengths by the sensor allows, after correction for Solar illumination and atmospheric effects, the retrieval of coloured biogeochemical products such as the chlorophyll, suspended sediment and coloured dissolved organic matter concentrations every hour between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm local time around the Korean peninsula. However operational exploitation of the mission needs beforehand a sound validation of first the radiometric calibration, i. e. inspection of the top-of-atmosphere reflectance, and second atmospheric corrections for retrieval of the water-leaving reflectance at sea surface. This study constitutes a contribution to the quality assessment of the GOCI radiometric products generated by the Korea Ocean Satellite Center (KOSC) through comparison with concurrent data from the MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS, NASA) and MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS, ESA) sensors as well as in situ measurements. These comparisons are made with spatially and temporally collocated data. We focus on Rayleigh-corrected reflectance (ρRC) and normalized remote-sensing marine reflectance (nRrs). Although GOCI compares reasonably well with MERIS and MODIS, what demonstrates the success of Ocean Colour in geostationary orbit, we show that the current GOCI atmospheric correction systematically masks out data over very turbid waters and needs further examination and correction for future release of the GOCI products. © 2012 Korea Ocean Research & Development Institute (KORDI) and the Korean Society of Oceanography (KSO) and Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.