Influencing factors in measuring absorption coefficient of suspended particulate matters

Absorption coefficient of suspended particulate matters in natural water is one of the key parameters in ocean color remote sensing. In order to study the influencing factors that affect the measurement, a series of experiments were designed to measure samples using transmittance method (T method), transmittance-reflectance method (T-R method) and absorptance method (A method). The results shows that absorption coefficient measured by the A method has a much lower error compared to the T method and T-R method due to influencing factors, such as filter-to-filter variations, water content of the filter, and homogeneity of filter load and so on. Another factor influence absorption coefficient is path-length amplification induced by multiple scattering inside the filter. To determine the path-length amplification, the true absorption was measured by AC-s (WetLabs). The linear fitting result shows that the mean path-length amplification is much higher for the A method than that of the T-R method and the T method (4.01 versus 2.20 and 2.32), and the corresponding correlation coefficient are 0.90, 0.87 and 0.80.For the A method and the T-R method, higher correlation coefficients are calculated when using polynomial fitting, and the value are 0.95 and 0.94. Analysis of the mean relative error caused by different influencing factors indicates that path-length amplification is the largest error source in measuring the absorption coefficient.