An ocean color sensor. It is a push-broom instrument that measures the radiation reflected from the Earth’s surface and from clouds in the visible and near-infrared range during the daytime. The 1150 km wide swatch of the instrument is divided into 5 segments covered by 5 identical cameras having corresponding fields of view with slight overlap between adjacent cameras. The geophysical parameters derived from MERIS measurements include ocean color in open and coastal waters, e.g. chlorophyll, gelbstoffe, and other pigments, qualitative parameters such as presence ofclouds and emerged land, and atmospheric parameters like aerosol optical thickness, cloud albedo, Angstrom exponent, top pressure, and water vapor column contents.