A Centuries long History of Participatory Science in Optical Oceanography: from observation to interpretation of natural water colouring (original) (raw)

Participatory science is not, as perhaps is believed, something of the 21st century. In this manuscript we show that over a century ago it were not only scientists who collected oceanographic data but also merchant sailors. A good example of such globally collected data are Forel-Ule observations, from which the first date back to 1889. This hardly explored (NOAA) dataset, containing around 228,000 of so-called ocean colour observations, was recently analysed on trends. Some of the material here presented refers to a recent publication ‘Trends in Ocean Colour and Chlorophyll Concentration from 1889 to 2000, Worldwide’ (Wernand et al., 2013). Since the launch of satellite-mounted sensors globe-wide monitoring of chlorophyll, a phytoplankton biomass proxy, became feasible. Just as satellites, the Forel-Ule (FU) scale record (a hardly explored database of ocean colour) has covered all seas and oceans - but already since 1889. We provided evidence of the usefulness of the Forel-Ule scal...