Seasonal Impact of Adjacency Effects on Ocean Color Radiometry at the AAOT Validation Site

The seasonal impact of adjacency effects (AE) on satellite ocean color data at visible and near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths by the Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer onboard the Aqua platform (MODISA), the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer, the Ocean and Land Color Instrument, the Operational Land Imager (OLI), and the MultiSpectral Imagery (MSI) was theoretically evaluated at a validation site in the northern Adriatic Sea. The analysis made use of comprehensive simulations accounting for multiple scattering, sea surface roughness, sensor viewing geometry, actual coastline, typical and extreme atmospheric conditions, and the seasonal variability of solar illumination and, land and water optical properties. Results, obtained by relying on the normalization of the radiometric sensitivity of each sensor to the same input radiance, show that the spectral and seasonal impacts of AE considerably vary among sensors. AE significantly exceed the radiometric sensitivity of MSI at its sole blue band in winter, whereas they significantly outdo the noise threshold of OLI and MODISA high-resolution data exclusively in the NIR in summer. Conversely, for all other sensors and for MODISA low-resolution data, AE are particularly significant at NIR bands between March and October and at the blue-green bands in winter.