A comparison of phytoplankton spring bloom fitting methods using MODIS satellite-derived chlorophyll-a concentration for the Maritimes region / Chantelle Layton, Emmanuel Devred, and Brendan DeTracey.: Fs97-18/340E-PDF

"Satellite-derived chlorophyll-a concentration time series have proven to be a valuable source of information to monitor marine ecosystems. In the Atlantic regions of Canada, these data are used to quantify the phytoplankton spring bloom timing, duration, and intensity. In this report, three different models were tested to characterize the spring bloom: the shifted Gaussian, currently implemented in the Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program reporting, the threshold method, and rate of change method. The objectives of the study were to test the robustness of each method to deal with missing data and the consistency of the bloom metrics when changing the number of parameters, or their value, in the optimization procedure. The three methods showed consistent results, but the choice of initial parameters, can have an impact on the spring bloom indices. The set of parameters that are optimized in the model also influenced the success in retrieving bloom parameters. Finally, we found that the shifted Gaussian is the best of the three methods for the retrieval of the spring bloom metrics as it can deal with time series with missing data, and thus should be used in the Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program and Atlantic Zone offshelf Monitoring Program reporting"--Abstract, page vi.

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