“…SAVANT's quality controls (Figure 2) include setting constraints for (a) the geographical box size of the average satellite data (1 km, 9 km, and 25 km), (b) the maximum temporal difference between the satellite overpass and the in situ measurement, (c) limiting the maximum observed windspeed (defaults to 8 ms −1 maximum) and aerosol optical thickness (defaults to 0.2), (d) the minimum and maximum valid normalized water-leaving radiance values, (e) the maximum coefficient of variance within the satellite box (measured standard deviation divided by measured mean, per match-up), (f) the number of valid satellite pixels (50% of the 5 × 5 box, for example, requiring 13 pixels to be valid), and (g) applying the following various quality control flags: high glint, maximum aerosol iteration [5], high polarization, stray light, absorbing aerosol, moderate sun glint, navigation failure, turbid water, low water-leaving radiance, epsilon out of range, and the high satellite and solar zenith flags. Previously, we set constraint thresholds and adjusted the individual constraints [6], in order to observe the impact of each individual constraint on the spectral ocean color and in situ match-ups. We defined protocols by determining what constraints were the closest to the optimum (based on statistical performance) match-up for use at the WaveCIS site.…”