ISRO’s Oceansat-3 has been tracking changes in terrestrial and aquatic biospheres. ISRO has released an animation depicting ocean chlorophyll levels and surface winds. The data allows scientists to identify high-productivity regions in the oceans.
ISRO has released an animation depicting nine months of data, showing surface wind levels over the oceans in the context of phytoplankton Chlorophyll concentration. The data for the animation was gathered between April and December 2023 by Oceansat 3, ISRO’s third generation ocean monitoring satellite. The spacecraft has an Ocean Colour Monitor (OCM-3) payload and a Scatterometer (SCAT-3) sensor on board, that together allow scientists to track the health of the oceans. OCM-3 measures the colour of the oceans, while SCAT-3 can track the surface winds.
The animation above consists of vegetation, phytoplankton blooms and surface winds at a grid resolution of four kilometres. The changes on land captures the greening and browning of continents over the course of 2023. The northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere depicts the evolution of green cover over summer and winter. Wind-driven circulation has resulted in phytoplankton blooms between October and December.
The data gathered by the instruments are also useful for tracking global land vegetation, as well as cyclogenesis, which is the strengthening of cyclonic atmospheric circulation. The OCM-3 can be used to track the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Oceansat 3 is one of the few orbital assets that can gather data on NDVI, ocean chlorophyll levels, and surface winds all at once. The monthly datasets were processed by the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), an ISRO associated facility in Hyderabad.
What Is Oceansat-3?
Oceansat-3 is also known as the Earth Observation Satellite-6, and was the primary payload on the PSLV-C54 mission that lifted off from ISRO’s spaceport in Sriharikota in November 2022, along with eight co-passenger satellites sharing the ride. The instruments on board can track the colour and temperatures of oceans, along with the direction of surface winds. Oceansat 3 also hosts the Argos 4 payload by the French space agency, a sophisticated suite of instruments for monitoring the physical and biological environment of the planet. There are multiple satellites in orbit with similar payloads, forming a global network used to track the movements of marine animals such as whales and sea turtles, within the context of environmental data.
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