Page 97 - International Space Station Benefits for Humanity, 3rd edition.

Florida,” said Amin. “HABs in the Gulf, particularly “Furthermore, this work will lead to improvements in
those on the West Florida Shelf, cause millions regional biochemical models by, for example, enabling
of dollars in socioeconomic damage each year, addition of a HAB component as a state variable in
threatening marine life and human health.” regional ecosystem models,” said Amin. “That facilitates
assimilation of bloom imagery into the models to
Amin formed a spin-off company, BioOptoSense, LLC,
based on this work. “The algorithm also may help us improve bloom predictions.”
understand environmental processes that contribute Watching for green from space could help keep
to HABs, ultimately benefiting human health and the beachgoers, and others, in the pink.
multibillion-dollar fishing and tourism industries,” he
adds. The University of Mississippi, City College of
New York and the Naval Research Laboratory have
already used the BioOptoSense algorithm.
Images used to develop the algorithm initially
came from the Hyperspectral Imager for the
Coastal Ocean (HICO) onboard the space station.
This special camera separated light into hundreds
of wavelength channels, revealing information about
the composition of water and land along the coasts.
HICO collected approximately 10,000 hyperspectral
scenes of Earth, most of them available through
NASA’s Ocean Color website.
HICO is no longer operating; however, the HAB
algorithm can use images from satellite sensors
such as Sentinel-3 and the Geostationary Ocean
Color Imager.
Because HABs usually occur when water
temperatures are warm, the problem may
grow as climate change causes warmer waters
around the globe.
By providing reliable, precise locations, the HAB
system potentially could represent significant cost
savings for coastal managers and organizations
that routinely send out sampling boats to collect
HAB data. These field measurements are labor
intensive, time consuming, and very costly.
This tool also allows coastal businesses such
as tourism operators to minimize the economic
hit from a HAB by preparing for a bloom before it
reaches the shore. Tourists can use this information
to plan their trips. Scientists studying the ecology Algae bloom in Lake Erie as seen from the ISS.
of HABs can target locations for field measurements Image credit: NASA
based on the actual presence of a HAB.

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