Study of Impact of Climatic Variability on the Sea Surface Temperature and Chlorophyll-a Concentration Using Statistical Analysis on Satellite Derived Data for the Arabian Sea

Abstract

The impact of long term variation in sea surface temperature (SST) on marine biomass using long-term satellite remote sensing data (1985 - 2006) for SST and (1998 – 2010) for chlorophyll-a was studies. This paper presents the result of the analysis conducted on t wenty one year’s data on high-quality satellite derived Sea Surface Temperature, and twelve years SeaWiFS chlorophyll-a data from Arabian Sea. The results are extracted after processing the data using statistical methods for computation of inter-annual seasonal mean and standard deviation. The mean winter data show that region consisting on Gulf of Oman is colder (< 21 o C) than the rest of Arabian Sea. However, annual mean of winter show the intermittent rise and fall in SST in response to El-Nino occurred in 1986, 1988, 1991–1995, 1997-1998, 2002, 2006 and La-Nino events which occurred in 1985, 1986, 1989, 1996, 1999 and 2000 years. The results of SST means for summer and Post-Summer seasons differ from the phenomenon observed in winter and Pre-Summer. During summer, SST of major part of the western Arabian Sea lower to 15 o C under the influence of up-welled water off Somalia and Oman coast. The results of chlorophyll-a concentration depict the increase of concentration with the lowering of SST in the area of northern Arabian Sea. Similar results are obtained for standard deviation computations of both parameters of sea surface during winter monsoon season. Whereas, the results of Standard Deviation for summer monsoon show the minimum values (<1) in the northern and central Arabian Sea and maximum in the alignment of zone under Ekman process. The comparison with temperature confirms the dependency of productivity of the sea surface.