East China Sea Region & Data Description Tips Animate

The East China Sea is an area bounded within these coordinates: 35°N 27°N 126.5°E and 120°E.

There are five different types of images produced for this area. These are a ci (Color Index) image, efai (Enhanced Floating Algae Index) image, fai (Floating Algae Index) image, flh (Fluorescence Line Height) image, and a normal rgb image. They are made in a unique processing stream. SeaDAS products are not produced for this area. Meris data is not available for this area.

You will notice that the most current imagery date is displayed. If there are several passes, they will be seen inside each of the tabs.

Where colorbars are available and applicable, if you click on a google earth icon, the colorbar will be shown inside Google Earth. For example, RGB and ERGB images have no associated color bar. When you click on a google earth icon, a kml file will be generated and sent for you to use in Google Earth.

HYCOM current data is also included in our kml files. Depending on the date of the image, different model experiments and runs have been used. The exact model and run is a clickable feature in the kml file. The HYCOM consortium is a multi-institutional effort sponsored by the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP), as part of the U. S. Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE), to develop and evaluate a data-assimilative hybrid isopycnal-sigma-pressure (generalized) coordinate ocean model (called HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model or HYCOM). The is default is to be visible in Google Earth, but the visiblity can be turned off by unchecking the Ocean Currents checkbox in the document.

NOTE: HYCOM is forecast data for the current date and should not be compared to real-time buoy data. HYCOM data is updated nightly and becomes the best available for imagery over 5 days old.

When a Google Earth link is clicked for a 'color' image (CI, CHL, RGB or ERGB depending on the area), in regions that contain Florida, or parts of Florida, Florida's FWC Karenia brevis data will be displayed as a layer. This will happen if you are viewing images from any week but the current week. Since FWC makes the data available on Friday, current week images do not have an association to K. brevis data until Saturday. The K. brevis data displayed corresponds to the date of the images you are viewing. All images during any one week are linked to that week's FWC K. brevis data. More information can be found at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Red Tide Current Status page

Mouse over an image to see a larger thumbnail.

Click on the thumbnail image itself to open the highest resolution image in a new window or tab (depending on your browser). Some data is presented at 1 kilometer resolution (1KM), other data are presented at 250 meter resolution (QKM).

The tabs represent different passes on the same day. The default is to select the latest pass available, and the last pass on any given day.

Use the Calendar above the "Menu" to select the date you wish to see. You can use either the Month / Year drop down boxes or the arrows to the right and left of them to navigate by month.

Should you need to link directly to a specific page and tab, you can click on the 'Direct Link Here' under each image and copy the new address in the browser, or, more simply, right click and copy the link location.
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CI: MODIS Color Index derived from reflectance data after correction for gaseous absorption, molecular scattering, and sun glint effects. It is basically the reflectance at 555 nm, referenced against linear baseline between 469 and 645 nm (Hu, 2011). CI has the advantage over the “standard” NASA chlor_a or other products because it is nearly immune to sun glint contamination, and therefore increases the data coverage for subtropical and tropical oceans. This is particular useful for cruise planning and for feature tracking. The MODIS standard product MOD35 (Ackerman et al., 2010) is used to discriminate clouds from water, and a cloudmask (grey color) is overlaid on the image.
EFAI: Enhanced Floating Algae Index (in reflectance units) to detect ocean surface features such as Sargassum, green macroalgae, and cyanobacteria. EFAI is nearly identical to FAI, except that one of the spectral bands to construct the background is 667 nm instead of 645 nm. Thus, it is more sensitive than FAI to detect subtle ocean surface features, but it saturates under sun glint, clouds, or thick aerosols (i.e., less coverage than FAI). See FAI description for more algorithm details.
FAI: Floating Algae Index (in reflectance units) to detect ocean surface features such as Sargassum, green macroalgae, and cyanobacteria. FAI is derived as the reflectance at 859 nm (after correction for gaseous absorption and molecular scattering), referenced against a linear baseline between 645 nm and 1240 nm (Hu, 2009). FAI has been used to study Qingdao’s green tides (Ulva prolifera blooms) (Hu et al., 2010a), cyanobacteria blooms in Taihu Lake (Hu et al., 2010b), and to detect Trichodesmium blooms in coastal waters (Hu et al., 2010c). Be very cautious to interpret the tiny surface features – they are very often small clouds.
FLH: Fluorescence Line Height (in reflectance units), derived using the spectral reflectance (after correction of the gaseous absorption and molecular scattering effects) and the Letelier and Abott (1996) baseline subtraction algorithm. It measures the solar stimulated chlorophyll-a fluorescence. In sediment-poor waters (< 5 ug/L) it can be used as a better proxy than the “standard” chlor_a product to represent surface chlorophyll-a concentrations (Hu et al., 2005), as FLH is much less sensitive to CDOM interference (McKee et al., 2007; Gilerson et al., 2007).
RGB: Red-Green-Blue composite image showing clouds, ocean, and land. The calibrated radiance is first converted to reflectance, and then corrected for gaseous absorption and molecular (Rayleigh) scattering effects (software credit: Liam Gumley, Jacques Descloitres, and Jeffrey Schmaltz of the University of Wisconsin). The resulting reflectance in the three MODIS bands (645 nm: R; 555 nm: G; 469 nm: B) is stretched to 0-255 to obtain the RGB image.