IMOS - Satellite Remote Sensing - MODIS - 01 day - Chlorophyll-a concentration (Carder model)

Phytoplankton biomass and diversity Hard coral cover and composition Ocean colour

The Aqua satellite platform carries a MODIS sensor that observes sunlight reflected from within the ocean surface layer at multiple wavelengths. These multi-spectral measurements are used to infer the concentration of chlorophyll-a (Chl-a), most typically due to phytoplankton, present in the water.

There are multiple retrieval algorithms for estimating Chl-a. These data use the Carder method implemented in the SeaDAS processing software l2gen and described in Carder K. L., Chen F. R., Lee Z. P., Hawes S. K. and Cannizzaro J. P. (2003), MODIS Ocean Science Team Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document, ATBD 19, Case 2 Chlorophyll a, Version 7, URL: http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/atbd/atbd_mod19.pdf (accessed 17 March 2022).

Production of contemporary MODIS data ceased at 2024/12/26. Users requiring similar Ocean Colour Radiometry data beyond 2024 should consider the VIIRS instruments on the SNPP and NOAA20+ series of satellites, also provided by IMOS.

Data and resources

Link to OPENDAP server

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Satellite Remote Sensing page on IMOS website

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View and download data though the AODN Portal

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srs_oc_aqua_chl_carder_url/chl_carder

SRS - OC - Carder - WMS layer

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srs_oc_aqua_chl_carder_url

The GoGoDuck subsets and aggregates gridded data. Data is returned as a NetCDF file.

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GoGoDuck help documentation

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srs_oc_aqua_chl_carder_url#file_url

The ncUrlList is a WFS service that returns a list of URLs matching a query.

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ncUrlList help documentation

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Access To AWS Open Data Program registry for the Cloud Optimised version of this dataset

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Access to Jupyter notebook to query Cloud Optimised converted dataset

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Website of the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS)

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License Graphic

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Additional information

Temporal extent	2002-07-04 – 2024-12-26
Date (creation)	2022-03-24
Status	completed
Update frequency	asNeeded
Metadata language	en
License	Data, products and services from IMOS are provided "as is" without any warranty as to fitness for a particular purpose.
Source metadata	ISO 19115 XML
Last updated	2026-11-05
Created	2026-11-05
API	package_show