One of the most intense areas of study in all of Earth Sciences is carbon cycling because of its potential influence in global warming and climate change. Natural waters contain large reservoirs of carbon that include pools of particulate organic carbon (POC) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC). Both of these parameters can been derived from IOPs, where typically POC is estimated from measurements of particulate attenuation or scattering and DOC is estimated from absorption measurements in the dissolved fraction or the fluorescence of humic substances (see references). Since empirical relationships between biogeochemical properties and associated IOPs can vary due to changes in the composition of the dissolved and particulate pools, these relationships may be region- and time-specific.

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