Role of sea-surface temperature in instantaneous chlorophyll retrieval

Ascertain how significant sea-surface temperature is for instantaneous surface chlorophyll-a retrievals from satellite remote-sensing reflectances.

Background

The authors investigate whether adding sea-surface temperature (SST) provides information beyond hyperspectral reflectances for estimating surface chlorophyll-a. Their symbolic-regression results show only a modest improvement from SST, while substantially increasing expression complexity.

They nevertheless note that the available matchup data provide limited SST coverage and that SST may have a different importance for instantaneous retrievals than for longer-term chlorophyll dynamics. The significance of SST therefore remains unresolved, particularly across broader environmental gradients.

References

While SST was shown to be important to the dynamics of $CHL$ over long time periods , it is still unclear how significant SST is for instantaneous surface $CHL$ retrievals from satellite.

— How Much Hyperspectral Information Does Chlorophyll Retrieval Really Need?  (2609.18531 - Hammoud et al., 16 Sep 2026) in Section 4.5, “Ancillary SST information”