Survey, 2017-11-14, Black Sea

Sevastopol 2017, bay and shelf

A late-autumn survey of Sevastopol Bay and the adjacent Black Sea shelf, 14–20 November 2017, 75,872 returns resolving an enclosed, organically loaded harbour where coloured dissolved organic matter and suspended sediment dominate the optical signal over a low chlorophyll background.

Published figures

Interpolated fields from the campaign, reproduced as issued. Plate titles carry the LIFL-9 under its original designation, UFL-9.

Interpolated chlorophyll a field mapped along the lidar track, Sevastopol Bay, 2017 campaign — Fig. 1Chlorophyll a

Interpolated CDOM field mapped along the lidar track, Sevastopol Bay, 2017 campaign — Fig. 2CDOM

Interpolated total suspended matter field mapped along the lidar track, Sevastopol Bay, 2017 campaign — Fig. 3TSM

Sevastopol BayBlack Sea

● Sevastopol 2017, 2017-11-14 → 2017-11-2075,872 measurements IDW interpolation, 600 samples

Chl-a0.080.30µg/L

CDOM3.014.61a.u.

TSS2.8825.5mg/L

Fig. 4 Campaign scan. 75,872 lidar returns along the ship track, switchable across Chl-a, CDOM, TSS. Field view interpolates the channel across the surveyed water from the same measurements (inverse-distance weighting). Shoreline: Natural Earth.

Sevastopol Bay is a deep, near-enclosed inlet on the south-western Crimean coast: sheltered, organically rich, and influenced by harbour and shoreline inputs rather than open-sea exchange. Over a week in November 2017 a LIF LiDAR logged 75,872 returns across the bay and onto the open shelf, mapping chlorophyll a, CDOM and total suspended matter together.

The bay’s optics invert the open-ocean case, chlorophyll a stays low, near 0.13 µg/L, while CDOM and suspended matter carry the structure, with median CDOM around 3.6 a.u. and suspended-matter peaks above 15 mg/L near the shore. Enclosed coastal water of this type is where active fluorescence sensing earns its place, separating the organic and particulate loads that passive colour reads as a single mixed signal.