Coral Reef "HotSpots"

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    • Description

    Bleaching of coral reefs of unexpected frequency and unprecedented extent occurred in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s, peaking with the 1997/98 El Niño. Marine scientists have shown water temperatures elevated above "summertime" climatological means are the primary cause of the massive bleaching in this period. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Sea Surface Temperature (SST) satellite imagery, 1982 to present, allow investigation of the phenomena on a global scale. Temperatures from moored and drifting buoys validate weekly averages of nighttime SST data. The analyses show virtually no bias in the satellite SST versus the in-situ buoy SST data and a random scatter of only 0.5°C throughout the tropics(1). SST data around bleaching sites in Bermuda, Tahiti, and Jamaica compared with SST data around a no-bleaching control site in Belize, prior to an episode in 1995, indicate that elevated SSTs coincided with severe bleaching events both in onset and duration. Other more recent episodes of bleaching during 1998 have been extensively reported(2,3) - See HotSpot Animations and Degree Heating Week pages.

    A coral reef team of the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) generates these coral reef bleaching monitoring products. The team comprises scientists from the Marine Applications Science Team (MAST) in Oceanic Research and Applications Division (ORAD) of Office of research and Applications (ORA) and from the Product Systems Branch (PSB) of the Information Processing Division (IPD) of the Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution (OSDPD) within NESDIS.

    References

    (1) Montgomery, R. S. and A. E. Strong, 1994: Coral bleaching threatens ocean, life, EOS, 75:145-147.

    (2) Wilkinson, C., Linden, O., Cesar, H., Hodgson, G., Rubens, J. and A. E. Strong, 1999. Ecological and socioeconomic impacts of 1998 coral mortality in the Ocean: An ENSO impact and a warning of future change? AMBIO, 28(2), 188-196.

    (3) Goreau, T., T. McClanahan, R. Hayes and A. E. Strong, 2000. Conservation of coral reefs after the 1998 global bleaching event. Conservation Biology, 14(1), 5-15.


    For more information about satellite coral bleaching studies, please contact
    coralreefwatch@noaa.gov

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