Passive remote sensing of the ocean color has changed our vision of the distribution of the phytoplankton and other optically-active constituents in the ocean. However, these observations have limitations as they cannot be obtained under clouds, under absorbing aerosols, at high latitudes, during the night, or over the vertical in the ocean. To overcome those limitations, lidars have been used, and led to many ocean discoveries despite not having an ocean optimized lidar satellite mission. To increase lidar literacy for the ocean community, it is necessary to provide comprehensive background and training on the technique but also on the ways to process the lidar signal. International efforts have developed lately in the form of an International Team at the International Space Sciences Institute. In this frame, a review of lidar algorithms provides a state-of-art description of the algorithms used to estimate the back-scattering and diffuse attenuation coefficients for elastic backscattering and high-spectral-resolution lidars.
Jamet et al. (Thu,) studied this question.