Abstract: Reconstruction of absortion, scattering and bioluminescence profiles from in situ oceanographic irradiance date is presented. The inverse problem is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem and the objective function is given by the square difference between experimental and computed data plus an entropic regularization term. The associated direct problem is iteratively solved by the Hydrolight 3.0 code that numerically solves the ratiative transfer equation by the invariant imbedding method. The proposed inversion technique yielded good results, using noise-corrupted synthetic data. An alternate sequence for the joint reconstruction of absortion, scattering, and bioluminecence profiles is also proposed.