We study two types of contamination of Ocean Color data related to the presence of sea ice. The first type, referred to as the adjacency effect, is the contamination of the radiance from the intended target by photons scattered in atmosphere towards the sensor but originating from a bright object such as sea ice nearby the target. The second type results from the presence of sub-pixel sea ice. In the case of the adjacency effect, the contribution of the icy environment to the top-of-atmosphere signal in the visible is not fully removed by the atmospheric correction algorithm, leading to an overestimation of the water-leaving reflectance. This is due to the strong spectral increase of atmospheric scattering with decreasing wavelength. The adjacency effect being more important at short wavelengths, the chlorophyll estimates based on the blue-to-green ratio will tend to decrease as the field of view approaches the ice edge. Conversely, contamination by sub-pixel sea ice results in an underestimation of the water-leaving reflectance, especially in the blue domain, and consequently to an overestimation of the chlorophyll concentration. The magnitude of the errors depends on the type of ice contaminating the pixel. It is more important for ice with high reflectance ratios for the wavebands 765 to 865 nm. Absolute error on the water-leaving reflectance up to 0.7% was observed, which is not acceptable for Ocean Color applications intending inversion of inherent optical properties from the absolute radiance, and for validation and vicarious calibration activities.
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