DETERMINING THE CONTRIBUTION OF PIGMENTS AND THE NONALGAL FRACTIONS TO TOTAL ABSORPTION - TOWARD AN IMPROVED ALGORITHM

Three methods that estimate the algal and nonalgal contributions to th e total particulate matter light absorption were analyzed against the experimental Kishino method in a wide variety of environments. We foun d that one method gave better overall correlations and slopes closer t o 1 than did the other methods, but the method overestimated the nonal gal fraction when the nonalgal absorption to total particulate matter absorption proportion in the sample was low. As a result, a correction is suggested and results are compared with those of the other methods , showing that the combined use of the original algorithm and the corr ection do configure a suitable basis for differentiating the algal and nonalgal fractions using as input only the total particulate light ab sorption data.