An Environmental Application of Satellite Remote Sensing: NOAA Coral Reef Watch Program’s Operational Near-Real-Time Global Coral Bleaching Monitoring (Invited Presentation)

Coral bleaching is considered as one of the major contributors to the increased deterioration of coral reef ecosystems worldwide being reported over the past few decades. The need for improved understanding, monitoring, and prediction of coral bleaching becomes imperative. With the capability of providing synoptic views of the global oceans in near-real-time and the ability to monitor remote reef areas previously known only to wildlife, satellite remote sensing has become a key tool for coral reef managers and scientists. As early as 1997, NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) began producing near-real-time, Web-accessible, satellite-derived sea surface temperature (SST) products to monitor conditions conducive to coral bleaching from thermal stress around the globe. As an emerging application in satellite oceanography, this activity quickly evolved into a crucial part of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch (CRW) Program in 2000. Recently, most of its key products, including SST anomalies, bleaching HotSpot anomalies, Degree Heating Weeks (DHW), and Tropical Ocean Coral Bleaching Indices have become “operational” products after successfully providing early warnings of coral bleaching to the global coral reef community as “experimental” products since their inception in the late-90s. In this presentation, these monitoring products are introduced and the application of these products on recent noteworthy bleaching events is demonstrated. The mass coral bleaching events in recent years include the 1998 global events, the 2001 event in the Ryukyu Islands, Japan, the 2002 event in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, the 2002 event in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and the 2004 event in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. While working on improving the accuracy of the monitoring products and their predictive capabilities, we are seeking to develop these products at higher spatial resolutions, monitor other related environmental parameters measured by other satellite sensors (such as surface wind, solar radiation, and wave field), incorporate simulations of numerical models, and develop new and more accurate algorithms.