Detecting Internal Waves From Satellite Ocean Color Imagery
Internal waves have been observed by lots of high resolution satellite images, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical images of SPOT and Landsat. These images are usually expensive. In this study, some free but lower spatial resolution satellite images are applied to observe the internal wave phenomena. The internal waves in the Sulu Sea are detected from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) onboard the Orbview-2 satellite. The SeaWiFS image has a spatial resolution of 1.1 km. It is acceptable to observe the internal wave phenomena while the soliton width is larger than the image resolution. The results show that the internal solitary in the Sulu Sea can be observed successfully with SeaWiFS chlorophyll images. The internal waves in the Sulu Sea have amplitudes of 10 to 90 m and wavelengths of 5 to 16 km. The large-amplitude internal solitary waves may significantly influence the near-surface chlorophyll concentration. The chlorophyll concentration would be lower when the depression internal waves passed through. A theoretic model is proposed and tested to estimate the amplitudes of internal waves from chlorophyll concentration images.