[1] The diffuse attenuation coefficient, K d (l) is a fundamental radiometric parameter that is used to assess the light availability in the water column. A neural network approach is developed to assess K d (l) at any visible wavelengths from the remote sensing reflectances as measured by the SeaWiFS satellite sensor. The neural network (NN) inversion is trained using a combination of simulated and in-situ data sets covering a broad range of K d (l), between 0.0073 m À1 at 412 nm and 12.41 m À1 at 510 nm. The performance of the retrieval is evaluated against two data sets, one consisting of mainly synthetic data while the other one contains in-situ data only and is compared to those obtained with previous published empirical (NASA, Morel and Maritorena (2001) and Zhang and Fell (2007)) and semi-analytical (Lee et al., 2005b) algorithms. On the in-situ data set from the COASTLOOC campaign, the retrieval accuracy of the present algorithm is quite similar to published algorithms for oligotrophic and mesotrophic ocean waters. But for Kd (490)