Sack Lunch Seminar (SLS)

SLS - David Siegel (UC Santa Barbara) - Regional to Global Scale Phytoplankton Dynamics: The SeaWiFS Legacy
Date Time Location
November 7th, 2012 12:10pm-1:00pm 54-915
The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) mission provided the first accurate consistent, traceable, synoptic observations of global ocean ecosystems. These observations have enabled us to address changes in the global biosphere on seasonal to decadal time scales and to assess the processes underlying these changes. In this talk, I will review how ocean ecological signals are assessed from the SeaWiFS measurements of Earth-leaving reflectance spectra and illustrate what the SeaWiFS tells us about changes of the ocean biosphere. In particular, I will focus on the complexity of assessing temporal trends in phytoplankton dynamics from satellite ocean color observations of surface chlorophyll concentrations and will address what these changes mean. Finally, I will discuss how the SeaWiFS mission provided guidance for future satellite missions and will report on the planning process for the next NASA research mission to assess ocean ecosystems and the carbon cycle (PACE).