High concentration of chlorophyll a occurred around the Ulleung Warm Eddy off Ulleung Island in the East Sea of Korea in spring season. The abnormal distributions of chlorophyll a were captured by satellite remote sensing and measured field data. The temporal and spatial scale of the abnormal distributions were around 20 days and 50km diameter off Ullung Island. The anomalies were quantified by estimated chlorophyll a derived from OCM and SeaWiFS ocean color data from 2000 to 2004. The origin of abnormal high concentrations was estimated by this study. It was that suspended material discharged from the Nakdong River and the coastal water located in the southeastern part of Korean Peninsula moved to northeastern coast, and then moved to off Ullung Island. The high chlorophyll a concentrations including inorganic materials were accumulated by anticyclonic eddy such as the Ullung Warm Eddy around Ullung Island in the East Sea of Korea in spring season.

Variations in phytoplankton concentrations result from changes of the ocean color caused by phytoplankton pigments. Thus, ocean spectral reflectance for low chlorophyll waters are blue and high chlorophyll waters tend to have green reflectance. In the Korea region, clear waters and the open sea in the Kuroshio regions of the East China Sea have low chlorophyll. As one moves even closer to the northwestern part of the East China Sea, the situation becomes much more optically complicated, with contributions not only from higher concentrations of phytoplankton, but also from sediments and dissolved materials from terrestrial and sea bottom sources. The color often approaches yellow-brown in the turbidity waters (Case Ⅱ waters). To verify satellite ocean color retrievals, or to develop new algorithms for complex case Ⅱ regions requires ship-based studies. In this study, we compared the chlorophyll retrievals from NASA's SeaWiFS sensor with chlorophyll values determined with standard fluorometric methods during two cruises on Korean NFRDI ships. For the SeaWiFS data, we used the standard NASA SeaWiFS algorithm to estimate the chlorophyll a distribution around the Korean waters using Orbview/ SeaWiFS satellite data acquired by our HPRT station at NFRDI. We studied to find out the relationship between the measured chlorophyll a from the ship and the estimated chlorophyll a from the SeaWiFS satellite data around the northern part of the East China Sea, in February, and May, 2000. The relationship between the measured chlorophyll_a and the SeaWiFS chlorophyll_a shows following the equations (1) in the northern part of the East China Sea. Chlorophyll_a=0.121Ln(X) + 0.504, R2 = 0.73 (1) We also determined total suspended sediment mass (SS) and compared it with SeaWiFS spectral band ratio. A suspended solid algorithm was composed of in-situ data and the ratio (LWN(490 nm)/LWN(555 nm)) of the SeaWiFS wavelength bands. The relationship between the measured suspended solid and the SeaWiFS band ratio shows following the equation (2) in the northern part of the East China Sea. SS=-0.703 Ln(X) + 2.237, R2 = 0.62 (2) In the near future, NFRDI will develop algorithms for quantifying the ocean color properties around the Korean waters, with the data from regular ocean observations using its own research vessels and from three satellites, KOMPSAT/OSMI, Terra/MODIS and Orbview/SeaWiFS.