Detection of Moroccan coastal upwelling using sea surface chlorophyll concentration

The aim of this work is to automatically identify and extract the upwelling area in the coastal ocean of Morocco using the satellite observation of chlorophyll concentration. The algorithm starts by the application of FCM algorithm for the purpose of finding regions of homogeneous concentration of the chlorophyll, resulting in c-partitioned labeled images. A region-growing algorithm is then used to filter out the noisy structures in the offshore waters not belonging to the upwelling regions. The proposed methodology has been validated by an oceanographer and tested over a database of 166 weekly Sea Surface chlorophyll data. The region of interst cover the southern part of Moroccan atlantic coast spanning from the years 2007 to 2012.