A simple tool for automatic extraction of Moroccan coastal upwelling from Sea Surface Temperature images

This work aims at automatically identify and extract the region covered by the upwelling waters in the costal ocean of Morocco using the well-known region-growing segmentation algorithm. The later consists in coarse segmentation of upwelling area which characterized by cold and usually nutrient-rich water near the coast. The proposed approach has been validated by an oceanographer over a database of 30 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) satellite images of the year 2007 obtained from Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor onboard NOAA-18 satellite serie. The results show a robustness and effectiveness to detect and reproduce the shape of upwelling area.