Optical remote sensing of ocean color is a well-established technique that
is used to produce maps of marine constituents on a routine basis. Retrieva
l algorithms used to infer pigment concentrations from measurements of ocea
n color are usually based on the assumption that the upper ocean column is
vertically homogeneous. However, stable stratification of the water column
is often encountered in coastal waters and in fjords. This stratification i
s decisive for the initiation, maintainance, and species composition of phy
toplankton blooms. Here we present an optical remote-sensing algorithm with
the ability to resolve such a vertical structure of oceanic waters. The ve
rtical structure is assumed to consist of two homogeneous layers with diffe
rent concentrations of chlorophyll a. The algorithm is designed to determin
e the chlorophyll-alpha concentrations of the two layers as well as the thi
ckness of the upper layer. These three parameters influence the ocean color
and are simultaneously retrieved through an inverse-modeling technique. Th
is technique consists of using radiative-transfer computations for a couple
d atmosphere-ocean system to simulate radiances received in various bands o
f the satellite sensor and to compare these simulated results with measured
radiances. The sum of absolute values of differences between simulated and
measured radiances is minimized by use of an optimization algorithm, and t
he retrieved parameters are those that yield the minimum sum of differences
between measured and simulated data. The optimization algorithm that we us
ed in our study is the simulated annealing method, which is an extension of
the downhill simplex algorithm. In this study the algorithm was tested on
synthetic data generated by the forward model. The results indicate that it
should be possible to retrieve vertical variations in the pigment concentr
ation. The synthetic data were generated for spectral bands that coincide w
ith those of the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer sensor, which will
be a part of the instrument package of the upcoming Environmental Satellite
. (C) 2001 Optical Society of America.