Session
Weekend Session 7: Science/Mission Payloads - Research & Academia II
Location
Utah State University, Logan, UT
Abstract
SEASALT is a small satellite mission designed to explore the estimation of salinity in coastal environments using ocean color. A SEASALT constellation would fill the coastal gap by providing coastal SSS observations with much higher spatial resolution (30m) and much shorter revisit times (less than 1 day) on a global scale. Planet’s nanosatellites currently provide daily monitoring of the earth’s surface, as well as coastal locations, at 3-meter resolution. However, they do not have the required bands needed in the near infrared (NIR) for atmospheric correction (they only possess 1 NIR band), thus making atmospheric correction over water very challenging. Accurate atmospheric corrections are fundamental to reliably retrieving salinity from ocean color. SEASALT has these required bands by design. Planet’s nanosatellites also do not have a 412nm band to monitor CDOM and create optimized salinity products. SEASALT has bands centered at 412nm, 470nm, 540nm, 625nm, 746nm, 865nm, and 12013nm. A SEASALT constellation has the potential to monitor coastal regions consistently on a global scale as locally-optimized salinity retrieval algorithms can be developed. Besides retrieving SSS with a high temporal and spatial resolution, SEASALT will retrieve concurrent sea surface temperature (SST).
Satellite for Estimating Aquatic Salinity and Temperature (SEASALT) - A Scientific Overview
Utah State University, Logan, UT
SEASALT is a small satellite mission designed to explore the estimation of salinity in coastal environments using ocean color. A SEASALT constellation would fill the coastal gap by providing coastal SSS observations with much higher spatial resolution (30m) and much shorter revisit times (less than 1 day) on a global scale. Planet’s nanosatellites currently provide daily monitoring of the earth’s surface, as well as coastal locations, at 3-meter resolution. However, they do not have the required bands needed in the near infrared (NIR) for atmospheric correction (they only possess 1 NIR band), thus making atmospheric correction over water very challenging. Accurate atmospheric corrections are fundamental to reliably retrieving salinity from ocean color. SEASALT has these required bands by design. Planet’s nanosatellites also do not have a 412nm band to monitor CDOM and create optimized salinity products. SEASALT has bands centered at 412nm, 470nm, 540nm, 625nm, 746nm, 865nm, and 12013nm. A SEASALT constellation has the potential to monitor coastal regions consistently on a global scale as locally-optimized salinity retrieval algorithms can be developed. Besides retrieving SSS with a high temporal and spatial resolution, SEASALT will retrieve concurrent sea surface temperature (SST).
