Abstract

The physical climate defines a significant portion of the habitats in which biological communities and species reside. It is important to quantify these environmental conditions, and how they have changed, as this will inform future efforts to study many natural systems. In this article, we present the results of a statistical summary of the variability in sea surface temperature (SST) time-series data for the waters surrounding Australia, from 1993 to 2013. We partition variation in the SST series into annual trends, inter-annual trends, and a number of components of random variation. We utilise satellite data and validate the statistical summary from these data to summaries of data from long-term monitoring stations and from the global drifter program. The spatially dense results, available as maps from the Australian Oceanographic Data Network's data portal (http://www.cmar.csiro.au/geonetwork/srv/en/metadata.show?id=51805), show clear trends that associate with oceanographic features. Noteworthy oceanographic features include: average warming was greatest off southern West Australia and off eastern Tasmania, where the warming was around 0.6°C per decade for a twenty year study period, and insubstantial warming in areas dominated by the East Australian Current, but this area did exhibit high levels of inter-annual variability (long-term trend increases and decreases but does not increase on average). The results of the analyses can be directly incorporated into (biogeographic) models that explain variation in biological data where both biological and environmental data are on a fine scale.

Highlights

  • A ubiquitous driver of ecosystem function is temperature

  • We use a 20-year long archive of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) imagery produced by the CSIRO Remote Sensing Group using the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) data broadcast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Environmental satellites (NOAA9 to NOAA19)

  • We have analysed 20 years of high-resolution Sea Surface Temperature data in order to produce a set of data summaries with unprecedented spatial resolution and statistical rigour for the Australasian region

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Summary

Introduction

A ubiquitous driver of ecosystem function is temperature. The way temperature varies through days, seasons and longer time scales is often a delineating feature of ecological habitats. While long-term climate change is undoubtedly important, it is not the only temperature-related ecosystem driver. Variation in temperature is likely to cause wide-spread perturbations to all levels of ecosystems [2,4]. A warmer climate will affect the ecosystem by increased water temperatures, changed circulation patterns, a changed oxygen content and acidification [3,4]. There are, other drivers like advection, river run-off and ice melt but these are of secondary importance and will be local pressures. This argument implies that the sea surface is an obvious quantity to investigate for variation in temperature, including long-term climate change induced responses

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