Plymouth Marine Laboratory (GB)
In situ bio-optical datasets are essential for the assessment of the uncertainties of satellite ocean colour measurements and derived products. This is especially critical in coastal waters (between 200m and 5km distance from the coastline), where land adjacency effects, complex atmospheric aerosol mixtures, high loads of optically active components in particular high concentration of chromophoric dissolved organic matter, and bottom reflectance effects contaminate the signal that reaches the satellite. Yet, extensive campaigns with unified sample collection and analysis protocols covering a wide range of optical and environmental conditions are rare in the literature.
The Tara expedition (https://fondationtaraocean.org/en/home/) within the frame of the Traversing European Coastlines project (https://www.embl.org/about/info/trec/expedition/), offers in 2023-2024 the unique opportunity of an oceanographic survey from a unique platform, using the same set of protocols, instruments, and sample analysis, collocated with a rich biological dataset describing the microbiologic diversity in detail. This integrated profiling across environmental and man-made gradients of micro- and macroscopic life will enable the collection of a first of the kind, pan-European census of European coastal ecosystems.
The Hyperspectral Bio-Optical Observations Sailing on Tara (HyperBOOST) project aims to extend the variables collected during the TREC integrated sampling by including bio-optical measurements relevant to present and future satellite ocean colour missions.
The aims of this project are to:
Frontiers in Remote Sensing (2023)
