Abstract: Harmful algal blooms(HAB) is one of the most serious marine disasters, which not only reduces fishery production, deteriorates the marine environment, affects coastal tourist industry, but also causes human poison. The satellite remote sensing technology has the characteristics of large-scale, low cost, synchronized and rapid monitoring, therefore it becomes an important method for HAB observation. In this paper, a HAB remote sensing monitoring system is developed based on C++ language. The system can achieve the whole procedure automatically from the satellite remote data acquirement and satellite image process, products generation, and it can automatically identify the HAB region using the spectral reflectance and inherent optical properties derived from remote sensing data. Currently, the national monitoring department has adopted this system for the operational monitoring of HABs in the East China Sea. From April to September 2013,the system had produced 55 red tide remote sensing monitoring products, and had a good application effect. The system was used to extract the location and area of 27 large red tide events which occurred in the East China Sea in recent years. Compared with the results of the field observation, it has a good effect on the recognition of most red tide range, and the discriminating accuracy of red tide is about 80%.

Key words: remote sensing, satellite data processing, HAB, HAB automatic monitoring system