Visible and Infrared Remote Sensing of the White Sea Bio-Geo-Chemistry and Hydrology Dmitry Pozdnyakov 1, 2 , Anton Korosov 1 , and Lasse Pettersson 2 1 Nansen International Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre, St.- Petersburg, Russia 2 Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre, Bergen, Norway was employed to monitor the surface expressions of some biotic and veloped to reconstruct the seasonal variations of the above substances in pixels occasionally masked by cloudiness. The developed software pack- age provided a means to obtain the series of intra-annual spatial and tem- poral variations of chl, sm, doc and sea surface temperature throughout the WS from SeaWiFS and AVHRR, respectively. The observed variations are controlled by (a) the dynamics of water turbidity and opacity due to sea- sonal variations in the content of sm and doc driven by the river discharge varying influence, and (b) thermo-hydrodynamic processes encompassing water density currents, tides, upwellings, fronts, etc. 1. Introduction The White Sea (WS) is attracting growing attention from both scientists and society. This is due to a new stage in the development of natural re- sources of the WS and its catchment area. These are extensive fishing, steadily developing farming of mariculture, vast engineering activities aim- ing to transport natural gas from the deposits in the Barents Sea shelf zone to west Europe. In addition, rapidly unfolding exploitation of diamond and gold quarries, escalating timber cutting/deforestation and agricul- tural development along with many other activities are inevitably af- fecting the WS ecosystem. The ongoing climate change is an extra forcing factor that should not be overlooked. minerals (sm) and dissolved organic carbon (doc) from space sensor data, taneous retrieval of contents of phytoplankton chlorophyll (chl), suspended Abstract. A new operational non-satellite-specific algorithm for a simul- abiotic processes in the White Sea (WS). A special technique has been de- 129 V. Barale, M. Gade (eds.), Remote Sensing of the European Seas. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008