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The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) is the primary instrument for studying oceanic factors that affect global change and assessing the oceans' role in the global carbon cycle and other biogeochemical cycles. The SeaWiFS Project operates a research data system to gather, process, archive, and distribute data received from an ocean color sensor.
In addition to ocean surface features (e.g., the near-complete disappearance of the Pacific equatorial upwelling, suppressed by the intense El Niño event), SeaWiFS has proven useful over the last 5 years in orbit in detecting, mapping, and tracking aerosols (e.g., smoke from fires, dust from drought areas), and land surface features (e.g., snow cover, vegetation cover, and deserts). SeaWiFS images have been used in many different research, applications, and public information activities and for many different phenomena (e.g., hurricanes, floods, fires, plumes of sediment, brilliant parallel blooms of different phytoplankton species, red tides, black water, dust storms, atmospheric vortex wakes, volcanic eruptions, the hazy pall of pollution). SeaWiFS images have even been used on local TV weather reports. New ENSO events can be monitored using MODIS and/or SeaWiFS.
The SeaWiFS instrument is currently flying on the SeaStar small satellite. The SeaWiFS instrument is follow-on sensor to the Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS) and is one of the heritage instruments for MODIS on the EOS Terra and Aqua satellites.
Users must register with the SeaWiFS Project as "Authorized Research Users." SeaWiFS Authorized Research Users are from 71 countries: Malaysia, Oman, Botswana, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cote d'Ivoire, Ecuador, Madagascar, Lebanon, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, New Caledonia, Peru, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay. The "top ten" in terms of the number of research users (other than the United States) is the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia, Russia, and the People's Republic of China.
NASA's SeaWiFS instrument data products featured on this CD-ROM
Disclaimer: NASA offers this suggested site for additional information regarding SeaWiFS. Web access is required. Link existence and contents are not under the control of the EOSDIS Science Operations Office.
SeaWiFS Web Sites