The HIGHROC (“HIGH spatial and temporal Resolution Ocean Colour”) project will carry out the R&D necessary for the next generation coastal water products and services from ocean colour space-borne data, giving an order of magnitude improvement in both spatial and temporal resolution and thereby opening up new applications and strengthening existing ones. This responds to SPA.2013 topic 1.1-06 “stimulating development of downstream services and service evolution”. GMES services for marine end-users, e.g. for Water Framework Directive (WFD) reporting , now routinely use data from ocean colour remote sensors such as MERIS and MODIS, to be followed by OLCI. Despite their improved coverage with respect to in situ monitoring, these sensors have critical limitations of spatial and temporal resolution (typically 300m, 1/day) with respect to user requirements.
HIGHROC will derive coastal water quality parameters from a) Sentinel-2 (S2) at 10-20m resolution and b) SEVIRI at 15 min resolution, thus complementing OLCI data with a more than 10-fold improve in spatial and temporal resolutions.
Theoretical work will consist of developing atmospheric correction and level 2 product algorithms for the S2 and SEVIRI sensors and Level 3 algorithms for multitemporal and synergistic exploitation of the new products with existing products such as those from OLCI and VIIRS. An image processing chain will provide corresponding full mission historical and near real time products for local areas including the dedicated test sites. In situ measurements will be carried out on dedicated test sites and used to validate the new S2 and MSG products.
Exploitation of the products will be supported by interaction with user partners and potential user groups with particular focus on the opportunities offered by the new HIGHROC products both for entirely new application areas and for significantly improved spatial and temporal resolution for existing applications, e.g. WFD monitoring and reporting.