Section: New Results

Detection and dynamics of coastal upwelling

Participants : Ayoub Tamim, Khalid Daoudi, Hussein Yahia, Joël Sudre, Driss Aboutajdine.

References: [18] , [34] , [35] , [33] .

An unsupervised classification method is developed for the coarse segmentation of Moroccan coastal upwelling using the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) satellite images. The algorithm is used to provide a seasonal variability of upwelling activity in the southern Moroccan Atlantic coast using 70 Sea Surface Temperature (SST) images of the years 2007 and 2008. The performance of the proposed methodology has been validated by an oceanographer, showing its effectiveness for automatic delimitation of Moroccan upwelling region. We have also explored the applicability of the Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering, using an adaptive cluster merging, for the problem of detecting the Moroccan coastal upwelling areas in SST satellite images.