This study highlights benefits and challenges of applying coupled physical/biogeochemical modeling and the synergistic use of different satellite retrieval algorithms for investigating the phytoplankton diversity in the Great Calcite Belt. This area is of great interest for understanding biogeochemical cycling and ecosystem functioning under present climate changes observed in the Southern Ocean. Our coupled model simulations of the phenology of various Phytoplankton Functional Types (PFTs) are based on a version of the Darwin biogeochemical model (Dutkiewicz et al., 2015) coupled to the MITgcm circulation model (MITgcm Group 2012), where both - the physical and biogeochemical modules - are adapted for the Southern Ocean. As satellite-based PFT information, we consider products of the PhytoDOAS (Bracher et al. 2009, Sadeghi et al. 2012) using SCIAMACHY and OMI hyper-spectral optical satellite measurements. We also address aspects of combining this information synergistically (SynSenPFT, Losa et al. 2017) with the phytoplankton composition retrieved with OC-PFT (Hirata et al. 2011, Soppa et. al. 2014, 2016) based on multi-spectral optical satellite data (OC-CCI) and obtained by numerical modelling to allow for long time-series on the Southern Ocean phytoplankton diversity. To evaluate the satellite retrievals and model simulations we use in situ PFTs obtained a diagnostic pigment analysis (Soppa et al., 2017) as well as by scanning electron microscopy (Smith et al., 2017).