Southern Ocean Whitecap Influence on Remote Sensing

Shipborne data from the R/V Melville cruise MV1102 investigates the impact of whitecaps on satellite-derived ocean color and aerosol measurements. The dataset was collected during a transect from Cape Town, South Africa, to Valparaiso, Chile, from February 2 to March 14, 2011. It includes measurements of whitecap coverage, surface reflectance, aerosol optical thickness, and in-situ profiles of marine optical properties to develop a bulk whitecap reflectance model.

Use Cases

• Validating satellite-derived aerosol optical thickness by comparing with in-situ measurements from the cruise.
• Developing correction models for whitecap reflectance in ocean color remote sensing algorithms.
• Analyzing profiles of marine reflectance, backscattering, and attenuation coefficients to understand subsurface optical properties.
• Correlating HPLC pigment data from water samples with optical measurements for bio-optical modeling.
• Studying the spatial distribution of whitecap coverage and its optical impact across the Southern Ocean transect.

Strengths

• Data collection covers a specific 41-day cruise across the Southern Ocean, providing a controlled, in-situ observational campaign.
• Includes multiple concurrent measurement types (whitecap coverage, aerosol thickness, marine reflectance profiles) for integrated analysis.
• Designed for direct comparison with satellite estimates to isolate whitecap effects in retrieval algorithms.

Limitations

• Specific column names, row counts, and dataset size are not provided by any source.
• Sources conflict on license information: one specifies 'other-license-specified', while another lists 'None'.
• The author and organization are inconsistently reported or listed as unknown.

Provenance

Source

OB_DAAC (Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center), with cruise data linked to the R2R repository.

Collection Method

In-situ measurements collected onboard the R/V Melville (MV1102) research vessel.

Time Range

2011-02-02 to 2011-03-14

Freshness

2026-03-13 17:40:59.627179

Geography

Southern Ocean transect from Cape Town, South Africa, to Valparaiso, Chile.