Abstract
Coral bleaching reported in the North Bay, Andaman Islands during the April last week of 2016 due to thermal stress. The Coral Bleaching Alert System (CBAS) a service providing by Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) has reported the warning and the bleaching has been confirmed from the field survey conducted on April 26, 2016. As coral reef is important fragile eco-system of the shallow marine environment suffers due to human and natural impacts. Bleaching has been initiated as weather predictions of the various agencies have suggested the elevated temperatures in the Indian subcontinent this year. We have put forward our remote sensing analysis of coral bleaching warning as Alert Level-1 followed by the initiation of the coral bleaching in the in-situ observation at Andaman Islands enhances the credibility of satellite observation and the service of INCOIS. These results were useful for the coastal management authority for taking suitable measure and policy on important coral eco-system.
Highlights
Corals are diverse shallow marine ecosystems that grow over geological time scales
HotSpot is the temperature above the recorded monthly maximum of climatology recorded and Degree of Heating Weeks (DHWs) is the sums of HotSpots greater than 1°C recorded over the past three months (12-weeks)
To understand the cause of thermal stress, additional parameters like Latent Heat Flux (LHF), Sensible Heat Flux (SHF), Photosynthetic Active Radiation (PAR) and Wind Speed were compared with night time Sea Surface Temperature (SST) (Figure 4)
Summary
Corals are diverse shallow marine ecosystems that grow over geological time scales. They play an important role as a habitat for organisms in their environs, supporting a vast diversity of animal and plant species. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) satellite-derived night-time Sea Surface Temperature (SST) values are used to assess thermal stress in the coral environs, which are in turn used to generate bleaching alerts. Stress During Summer Months of 2016: A Geospatial Assessment method is similar to the NOAA Reef Watch program. This information highlights the early signs of increasing thermal intensity and the spatial extent of coral bleaching. The corals of the Andaman Island were victims of thermal stress due to elevated temperatures, which resulted in coral bleaching in the past during 1998, 2002, 2005 and 2010 [8, 9, 10, 11]
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