A Remote Sensing approach in a marine coastal zone: Gulf of Manfredonia

This study examines the relationship between temperature and chlorophyll-a in the Gulf of Manfredonia, a coastal zone on the Italian side of the Adriatic Sea. During May 2003, images of [chl-a] and sea surface temperature of the test area have been collected by SeaWiFS and MODIS spectroradiometers. MODIS case2-3band algorithm and SST4 algorithm derived values matched well to the measures obtained from ship surveys. Multivariate statistical measures were computed to determine how MODIS derived pigment and sea surface temperature distributions covaried in the Gulf of Manfredonia. All (except on 16th May) couples of [chl-a] and temperature images with a number of pixels greater than a threshold of around 5000 have a positive correlation coefficient R-CT. These greater images are more suitable to study the correlation, because they have a better geometric resolution and for each pixel is smaller the loose of punctual information.