Satellite-borne ocean color sensors measure the amount of sunlight reflected from the Earth. Over the ocean, most of that reflected light comes from the atmosphere. An ocean-color scientist must take steps to separate the small part of the satellite measurement that is actually reflected from just below the water's surface. The sequence of images below crudely illustrates some of the steps in this process.

The view of the Arabian Sea was collected by the VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi-NPP spacecraft on January 15, 2018. Click any of the images to get higher-resolution versions without the annotations.

Ocean Color Animations

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