Monitoring algae blooms in the Baltic Sea: a multi sensor approach

The authors present data from four different satellite sensors, which have been acquired over the same sea area during an algae bloom, within less than two hours. The data includes: the Thematic Mapper (TM) on Landsat-5, the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) aboard the Second European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS-2), the Wide Field Scanner (WiFS) aboard the Indian IRS-1C satellite, and the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) flown on the NOAA-14 satellite. Using this extensive data set, for the first time, an investigation of the usefulness of the fusion of different remote sensing data (particularly by incorporating radar data) for monitoring of an ongoing algae bloom has been performed. The results of their analysis show that the fusion of optical and microwave remote sensing data (even with different spatial resolutions) can yield more information about the biological and oceanic characteristics of sea surface areas.