MarQUEST was led by Prof Andrew Watson (UEA), with 15 co-investigators at UEA/BAS, the Universities of Southampton, Essex, and Reading, and from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory and Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory.

This dataset contains monthly inherent optical absorption properties for 1998-2007 calculated from SeaWiFS/SeaStar Level 3 products.

QUEST scientists cooperated in comparing various models, and examining more fundamental (physiological) approaches to understanding the planktonic ecoystem. MarQUEST also developed a module to simulate coastal ecosystems, usable in global ocean biogeochemical simulations. Finally, the project team generated an accurate physical simulation of the North Atlantic guided by data assimilation, into which ecosystem simulations can be embedded. This allows the variation in air-sea fluxes of gases (CO2, oxygen and dimethyl sulphide) from ocean to atmosphere to be quantified for the contemporary period.

This data was produced by Takafumi Hirata, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Plymouth, UK as part of NERC Programmes: Centre for the observation of Air-Sea Interaction and fluXes (CASIX), National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) and Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System (QUEST).