The Icelandic shelf area is ranked among the most productive in terms of annual primary production. Nevertheless, phytoplankton growth is highly variable, both spatially and temporally due to factors as vertical winter mixing (Ólafsdóttir 2006), stratification v.s. wind stress, upwelling and cloud cover (Thórdardóttir 1984).

Chlorophyll values based on remote sensed data are being used more frequently to explore primary production in the North Atlantic. In the Icelandic waters, current information on primary production is limited to seasonal surveys. No indices exist with high spatial or temporal resolution. In order to estimate the feasibility of using remote sensing data to construct such indices, the current study attempts to evaluate how representative remotely sensed CHL is, by comparing it to data values obtained from the annual surveys in Icelandic waters. Previous studies have mainly addressed coarse resolution of satellite data based on weekly, monthly or seasonal averages of chlorophyll (Gudmundsson et al. 2009). In this study we use a finer scaled data by comparing satellite records and surveys at individual dates and locations. Preliminary results reveal medium strong and significant correlation between survey and satellite values; however there are both temporal and spatial differences. Still, the use of global datasets is likely to provide satisfactory estimates of chlorophyll values in this region.