07 May 2021 Story Oceans & seas

Progress Meeting of the development of a Near Real-Time Monitoring System for Marine and Coastal Eutrophication Using Google Earth Engine

The Northwest Pacific Region Environmental Cooperation (NPEC), the host organisation of the NOWPAP Special Monitoring and Coastal Environmental Assessment Regional Activity Centre (CEARAC), organised an online Progress Meeting on the development of a Near Real-Time Monitoring System for Marine and Coastal Eutrophication Using Google Earth Engine (GEE) on 7 May 2021.

NEAT progress meetingAfter the kick-off of the project (GEO-GEE Eutrophication Watch Project, in short) in 2020, the project members gathered several times online and reviewed the progress. This meeting of May 7, 2021, was attended by representatives of the Nagoya University, NPEC, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, GOOGLE, Limited Liability Company (LLC), the Northwest Pacific Action Plan (UNEP-NOWPAP), and the Japan Association for UNEP.

The meeting thoroughly discussed that effective monitoring of eutrophication status based on a long-term consistent chlorophyll-a concentration dataset blended from a different satellite is necessary, and NPEC had worked on developing a procedure of ingesting the Level 2 ocean colour data of MODIS on Aqua and SGLI on GCOM-C into the Google Earth Engine. The project members agreed that establishing a standardised workflow to ingest Level 2 data starting from the NOWPAP sea area is a priority, which then can be expanded to other parts of the world ocean.