NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) has released a new version (v4.0) of its world-renowned daily global 5km-resolution satellite coral bleaching heat stress monitoring product suite.
For more than 20 years, NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) has been the world’s leader in observing, predicting, and communicating changes in the coral reef environment to a diverse, global user community. In mid-December 2021, CRW’s daily global 5km-resolution satellite coral bleaching heat stress products detected a significant build-up of oceanic heat stress on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Australia. This signified the GBR was starting its 2021-2022 summer season with a much earlier onset of accumulated heat stress than ever recorded before. At the same time, CRW’s modeled Four-Month Coral Bleaching Heat Stress Outlook indicated the significant heat stress would continue, leading to a potential mass coral bleaching event on the GBR (following on the heels of confirmed mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017, and 2020).
ESSIC/CISESS Scientist Jacqueline De La Cour was a contributor and reviewer of The Sixth Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2020 Report, released by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) on October 5th. This sixth edition is the first since 2008 and the first based on the quantitative analysis of a global dataset, compiled from more than 300 contributors and comprising almost 2 million observations from more than 12,000 sites in 73 countries.
ESSIC/CISESS scientists Erick Geiger, Gang Liu, and Jacqueline De La Cour at NOAA Coral Reef Watch have a new article on satellite ocean color data published in the 13 April 2021 issue of Frontiers in Marine Science. The goal of their study was to determine how best to fill satellite data gaps from cloud cover and quality control exclusions in shallow water. They tested a combination of six spatial (horizontal scale below) and seven temporal scales (vertical scale below) for aggregating data from the VIIRS instrument at several coral reef locations in Maui, Hawai‘i and Puerto Rico and compared these with in situ measurements of water turbidity.
Example outputs from the Version 3.1.0 Thermal History products in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands: Within-Year (Annual) SST Average (left), and
On April 30, 2020, NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) and NESDIS’ Office of Satellite and Product Operations retired CRW’s heritage twice-weekly global 50km satellite coral bleaching heat stress monitoring product suite, replacing it with CRW’s next-generation daily global 5km coral bleaching heat stress monitoring products.
Coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world. They provide significant ecological, economic, and societal benefits, from supporting marine species to protecting our coastlines to generating $9.8 trillion per year globally and $3.4 billion in the United States alone.
