IMOS - Satellite Remote Sensing - MODIS - 01 day - Chlorophyll-a concentration (OC3 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 OC3 method recommended by the NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group and implemented in the SeaDAS processing software l2gen. The OC3 algorithm is described at http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/cms/atbd/chlor_a (and links therein).

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_oc3_url/chl_oc3

SRS - OC3 - WMS layer

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srs_oc_aqua_chl_oc3_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_oc3_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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Chl-a MODIS Aqua L2 5-min granules remapped OC3 SeaDAS 6.1 - dataset download

IMOS Ocean Colour Data Archive

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License Graphic

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Additional information

Temporal extent	2002-07-04 – 2024-12-26
Date (creation)	2014-04-03
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