Optical and biogechemical field data,material-specific IOPs and measured vs. modeled constituent concentrations of surface water samples from RV Alliance cruise BP09, March 2009

The inversion procedure requires knowledge of local material‐specific inherent optical properties (SIOPs) which are determined from natural samples using a bio‐optical model that differentiates between Case I and Case II waters and uses least squares linear regression analysis to provide optimal SIOP values.

A synthetic data set is used to demonstrate that the approach is fundamentally consistent and to test the sensitivity to injection of controlled levels of artificial noise into the input data. Self‐consistency of the approach is further demonstrated by application to field data collected in the Ligurian Sea, with chlorophyll (Chl), the nonbiogenic component of total suspended solids (TSSnd), and colored dissolved organic material (CDOM) retrieved with RMSE of 0.61 mg/m**3, 0.35 g/m**3, and 0.02 /m, respectively.