Traditional methods of measuring CDOM include UV-visible spectroscopy (absorbance) and fluorometry (fluorescence).  Optical proxies have been developed to characterize sources and properties of CDOM, including specific ultraviolet absorbance at 254 nm (SUVA) and spectral slopes for absorbance, and the fluorescence index (FI), biological index (BIX), and humification index (HIX) for fluorescence.  Excitation emission matrices (EEMs) can be resolved into components in a technique called parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC), where each component is often labelled as "humic-like", "protein-like", etc.  As mentioned above, remote sensing is the newest technique to detect CDOM from space.