5. The Benguela:
Summary and conclusions

In this lesson you have looked at some of the techniques used to study plankton productivity in a costal upwelling system. You have seen how Sea Surface Temperature (SST) data and ocean colour data can be used synergistically to provide information about upwelling events.

You should now be able to create a colour composite suitable for illustrating the bright colour signature of coccolithophore blooms and sulphur eruptions, both common in the Benguela system. You have used meta-data information and Bilko formulae to convert 8-bit integer chlorophyll data to true chlorophyll concentrations and should be able to apply MERIS and AATSR level 2 flags to mask areas affected by cloud.

You have learnt how to geolocate, rectify and resample images to create temporal composites using several MERIS scenes and compare the advantages and disadvantages of different time periods.

Lastly you compared chlorophyll concentrations derived from measurements by different sensors and investigated the relationship between sea surface temperature and chlorophyll concentrations.