Analysis of the NIR remote sensing reflectance spectra of ocean water is one of the most fruitful approaches for the retrieval of chlorophyll-a in the presence of suspended matter in coastal zones. However, this spectral region is affected by strong changes of pigment, water absorption gradients as well as chlorophyll-a fluorescence which can modify the reflectance significantly. Using a recently developed polarization technique for the separation of scattering and fluorescence in reflectance spectra of algae in sea water, we report on the results of lab experiments isolating the fluorescence and scattering spectra for different combinations of algae and suspended particles. Numerical simulations are performed over a wide set of different water compositions to determine the accuracy in fluorescence height retrieval using polarization discrimination. Finally, the fluorescence retrieved using the polarization method is quantitatively compared to conventional baseline methods. It is shown that errors increase with the mineral loading when baseline algorithms are applied and will adversely affect the retrievals performed using NIR algorithms.
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