The development and improvement of high-resolution remote sensing are allowing for greater applications to coastal areas. For example, advances in the high resolution include a sub-kilometer resolution from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), as well as improvements in removing land contamination from passive microwave instruments. They allow coastal monitoring with a spatial and temporal resolution that has not been fully exploited or validated. In addition, longer temporal availability and new direct or derived measurements allow a more holistic spatially-explicit study of these regions. In this session, we focus on the critical coastal upwelling regions of the world’s oceans. As these are areas of tremendous economic importance, monitoring and understanding possible long term changes in ocean  biophysical parameters and their impacts is critical.

Sea surveys conducted by long-term monitoring programs such as the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) provide unique opportunities for validation in a coastal regime. At the same time, other monitoring programs in other upwelling regions of the world are as, if not more, valuable to validate the use of remote sensing in coastal areas given the scarcity of data. Presentations that apply remote sensing to identify and validate the (sub)-mesoscale variability in the different coastal upwelling regions of the world are especially sought. This includes validation from the seasonal to interannual time scales. Applications that use high-resolution models are also encouraged.