As part of the programme, the COOL team presented a conference poster, highlighting the latest developments and findings from the project.
The poster provided an opportunity to engage with the international marine science community, providing an excellent platform to showcase COOL’s progress, exchange ideas with collaborators, and gather valuable feedback from experts across multiple disciplines.
Participation in OSM26 reinforces the project’s role within the wider ocean science community and supports its mission to advance knowledge of marine systems and their response to environmental change.
Poster Abstract
The coastal ocean plays a critical role in the ocean carbon cycle, yet our current understanding of the different pools and fluxes of organic carbon is limited by strong local dynamics, which requires high spatial and temporal resolution of observations covering relatively large areas across the shelf seas. Satellite remote sensing of carbon pools and fluxes at high spatial resolution and daily frequency can cover this gap in observations, but new algorithms need to be developed and validated.
In the ESA project “Carbon from earth Observation between Ocean and Land (COOL)”, we aim to estimate carbon pools and fluxes for which algorithms are relatively mature, and hence we can have some certainty in their application in the coastal ocean at the global scale in the near future. These include Particulate Organic Carbon (POC), Particulate Inorganic Carbon (PIC), Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) and Primary Production (PP). Using data from Sentinel-3 OLCI at 300 m resolution and Sentinel-2 MSI at 60 m, we aim to produce an internally consistent coastal ocean carbon satellite dataset in selected European coastal regions. We make use of in situ datasets for evaluation and validation of these satellite products.
The newly produced Earth Observation datasets will be used to improve our understanding of the organic carbon cycle in two coastal regions. In the Baltic Sea, the influence of rivers on DOC, the trends in DOC and the extent of the river influence in the coastal waters of the Baltic Sea is analysed. The highly productive upwelling areas of the western Galician coast, in the northwest of Spain, will be investigated using the newly developed satellite datasets to understand the role of upwelled and outwelled waters on the distribution of the DOC and POC and their relationship with PP.