Have you done the back of the envelope numbers on surface area? My first reaction was skepticism about the total surface area of "Bloomsdays" (blooms as % of ocean surface area / all available days). Most of the area and most of the earth is not covered in plankton blooms.That calculation might tell you that the bloom albedo value necessary for significant radiative forcing too great to be plausible, which would save you the trouble of doing imagery analysis.
--- Fred Zimmerman Geoengineering IT! Bringing together the worlds of geoengineering and information technology GE NewsFilter: http://geoengineeringIT.net:8080 On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 11:34 PM, Andrew Lockley <[email protected]>wrote: > I'm trying to find some data on ocean albedo with/without phytoplankton > blooms. This is in order to assess whether the albedo impact of Ocean Iron > Fertilization is likely to be significant on the Earth's radiation budget. > > The current data sources I have suffer from a couple of issues. > > 1. Uncalibrated albedo - Many photos of blooms are available online, but > these don't have an absolute brightness scale. I.E. pure white on the photo > doesn't constitute 100% reflectivity. Accordingly, it's little better than > guesswork to determine what the actual albedo is from this source. > 2. Blooms not distinguished - I've seen accurately measured albedo ranges, > but these don't specifically attempt to distinguish between bloom and > non-bloom conditions. Accordingly, there's no way to determine from this > data what the difference is when a bloom is present. > > So I'm stuck. Does anyone have albedo data, or know where I could get it > from? Ideally, I suppose this would be from an OIF ship, but it strikes me > as likely that other people will have gathered data in the course of > unrelated research. > > I'm really keen to run the numbers on this, but without this data I'm not > able to proceed. Any ideas/help/sources/advice/datasets gratefully received > . > > Thanks > > A > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "geoengineering" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
