Shovon presented a poster on “Estimates of Phytoplankton Carbon by an Absorption- Based Ocean-Colour Algorithm” at the Colour and Light in the Ocean (CLEO) from Earth Observation symposium at Frascati, Italy. In this poster a new bio-optical algorithm to estimate the carbon-to-chlorophyll ratio based on the light-absorption coefficients of phytoplankton was presented, from which the stocks of carbon in various phytoplankton size classes were estimated. This approach combined the empirical allometric relationships of phytoplankton with an absorption-based algorithm for estimating phytoplankton size spectra developed previously. The variations of carbon-to-chlorophyll ratio and total carbon across plankton size classes, and over the globe, obtained by this method, using merged ocean-colour time series from ESA Ocean-Colour Climate Change Initiative, were presented. Further, a comparison of the new estimates of phytoplankton carbon stocks with those based on existing algorithms was also be shown.
