UMD/NOAA Coral Reef Watch has been using new satellite products to enact real change to protect coral reefs from the threats of climate change.
NOAA Coral Reef Watch’s satellite Bleaching Alert Area product shows high heat stress persists in the South and East China Seas, impacting coral reefs throughout the region.
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).
A new paper by the NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) program, an initiative supported by the ESSIC-administered Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies (CISESS), shows that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) started the 2021-2022 summer season with more accumulated oceanic heat stress than ever before in the satellite record (i.e., 1985 to the present). As of December 14, 2021, NOAA CRW’s daily global 5km satellite coral bleaching heat stress products indicated that instantaneous heat stress and accumulated heat stress over the prior 12 weeks were unprecedented on the GBR.
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.
This month, NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) completed two product development milestones, to implement an improved Four-Month Coral Bleaching Heat Stress Outlook and develop the methodology for a new, prototype Coral Reef Resilience product.
NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) staff contributed to the development and promotion of a workshop associated with the 14th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS), held virtually on July 21, 2021.
NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW)’s operational daily global 5km satellite coral bleaching heat stress products are being used by Arizona State University (ASU) and its partners to create a new Bleaching layer (currently in beta status) in the Allen Coral Atlas. The Bleaching layer, which is updated every two weeks, detects variations in coral reef brightness using high-resolution Planet Dove satellite visible-band imagery and an advanced algorithm, to indicate whether reefs are experiencing heat stress, such as that from marine heatwaves, and bleaching.
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.
