Comparison of Composite Methods of Satellite Chlorophyll-a Concentration Data in the East Sea

To produce a level-3 monthly composite image from daily level-2 Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) chlorophyll-a concentration data set in the East Sea, we applied four average methods such as the simple average method, the geometric mean method, the maximum likelihood average method, and the weighted averaging method. Prior to performing each averaging method, we classified all pixels into normal pixels and abnormal speckles with anomalously high chlorophyll-a concentrations to eliminate speckles from the following procedure for composite methods. As a result, all composite maps did not contain the erratic effect of speckles. The geometric mean method tended to underestimate chlorophyll-a concentration values all the time as compared with other methods. The weighted averaging method was quite similar to the simple average method, however, it had a tendency to be overestimated at high-value range of chlorophyll-a concentration. Maximum likelihood method was almost similar to the simple average method by demonstrating small variance and high correlation (r=0.9962) of the differences between the two. However, it still had the disadvantage that it was very sensitive in the presence of speckles within a bin. The geometric mean was most significantly deviated from the remaining methods regardless of the magnitude of chlorophyll-a concentration values. Its bias error tended to be large when the standard deviation within a bin increased with less uniformity. It was more biased when data uniformity became small. All the methods exhibited large errors as chlorophyll-a concentration values dominantly scatter in terms of time and space. This study emphasizes the importance of the speckle removal process and proper selection of average methods to reduce composite errors for diverse scientific applications of satellite-derived chlorophyll-a concentration data.