Case Study: Moss Landing Marine Laboratories achieves reliable ocean color validation and streamlined instrument control with MathWorks MATLAB and Instrument Control Toolbox

Moss Landing Verifies Ocean Color Data with MATLAB and Instrument Control Toolbox

Moss Landing Marine Laboratories needed a more flexible, portable way to verify and calibrate marine optical sensors (MOS) used to validate NASA–NOAA ocean color satellites. Their prior VAX/C setup was cumbersome and inflexible, while the MOS instruments faced degradation on the MOBY buoy and noisy shipboard measurements from wave-induced refraction. To address strict precision requirements for satellite validation, they turned to MathWorks products MATLAB and Instrument Control Toolbox.

MathWorks’ solution used MATLAB and Instrument Control Toolbox to control MOS from laptops: a library of functions sends Forth commands to the instruments, acquires serial A/D and spectral data, digitizes and converts units, and processes it directly in MATLAB. A custom GUI automates measurement routines (e.g., two dark scans and five light scans per collector) and averages repeated reads to remove wave noise. As a result, MathWorks’ tools give Moss Landing a single environment for acquisition and analysis, faster access to data, simplified automated measurement sequences, and adaptable on‑the‑spot calibration procedures that meet the project’s precision needs.

Moss Landing Marine Laboratories

William Broenkow

Project Leader