Abstract
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch (CRW) program has been providing resource managers, scientific researchers, and other coral reef ecosystem stakeholders with coral bleaching heat stress products for more than 20 years. The development of the CoralTemp sea surface temperature (SST) dataset has allowed CRW to produce the Coral Bleaching Heat Stress product suite with climatologies and daily SST measurements from within the same SST dataset, significantly improving data quality. Previously, the Monthly Mean (MM) SST and Maximum Monthly Mean (MMM) SST climatologies were derived using a different dataset from the near real-time SST. Here we provide an up-to-date description of how each product within the Coral Reef Watch Coral Bleaching Heat Stress product suite version 3.1 is derived, including descriptions of the MM, MMM, SST Anomaly, Coral Bleaching HotSpot and Degree Heating Week (DHW) products.
Highlights
In the face of increased mass coral bleaching due to climate change [1,2,3], tools that allow coral reef managers, scientists and stakeholders to monitor the extent and severity of coral bleaching are becoming more and more important
This paper provides a detailed description of the key components to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch (CRW) Coral Bleaching Heat Stress product suite version 3.1, including: the CoralTemp sea surface temperature (SST) product, the Monthly Mean (MM) climatology, the Maximum Monthly Mean (MMM) climatology, the SST Anomaly product, the Coral Bleaching HotSpot (HS) product, and the Degree Heating Week (DHW) product used to monitor heat stress, leading to mass coral bleaching
If the 12-week window ending on June 1, 2014 (i = 1 June 2014), had included only four daily Coral Bleaching HotSpot values above zero, of 1.0, 2.0, 0.8 and 1.2 ◦C, since 0.8 ◦C is less than 1 ◦C, it would not be included in the DHW summation of accumulated heat stress for this period
Summary
In the face of increased mass coral bleaching due to climate change [1,2,3], tools that allow coral reef managers, scientists and stakeholders to monitor the extent and severity of coral bleaching are becoming more and more important. This paper provides a detailed description of the key components to the NOAA CRW Coral Bleaching Heat Stress product suite version 3.1, including: the CoralTemp SST product, the Monthly Mean (MM) climatology, the Maximum Monthly Mean (MMM) climatology, the SST Anomaly product, the Coral Bleaching HotSpot (HS) product, and the Degree Heating Week (DHW) product used to monitor heat stress, leading to mass coral bleaching Some of this methodology has been previously published [5,6,7]; this is the first time that these products have all been detailed in the one paper. It serves as a reference for users of the CRW Coral Bleaching Heat Stress product suite, providing a clear description of the algorithms and methods
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