An analytical approach based on Cramer-Rao Bounds (CRBs) is proposed to investigate the uncertainties in ocean color optical properties. Here, CRBs are explicitly developed using a water reflectance model corresponding to shallow waters. CRBs are shown to be consistent with the experimental estimation variances obtained using the well known least square optimization technique. CRBs does not require to perform any inversion of the reflectance. It is shown that a priori knowledge of bathymetry greatly improves the retrieval of bottom cover for shallow waters. CRBs are used to quantify the minimum uncertainties in the inversion of ocean color parameters for the MSI, HICO, OLCI and MODIS configurations for a variety of oceanic and coastal waters [Jay et al., 2018]. CRBs are shown to provide valuable information about the best inversion performances that may be expected for a given sensor.

The subsurface remote-sensing reflectance µ is given by the following semi-analytical model [Lee et al., 1999] (1)