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The connection might not be immediately obvious, but satellites that orbit around the earth are a crucial tool in monitoring the environmental conditions that cause coral bleaching. How can a satellite that is hundreds to thousands of miles above the ocean help the coral colonies that grow below the surface? On board some of these satellites is a critical sensor that measures the radiation that comes from the surface of the earth, including the ocean, allowing us to monitor the sea surface temperature (SST). On geostationary satellites (which we will cover later in this section), these sensors include the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-East Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI); GOES-West ABI; Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI); and the Himawari-8 Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI). On polar-orbiting satellites (which we also will discuss in this section), these sensors include the NOAA-20 Polar Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR); Metop-B AVHRR; and the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). Because the satellites orbit around the earth, NOAA and its partners measure SST around the entire globe multiple times per day, every day. Please read on for more information about remote sensing, environmental satellite systems operated by NOAA and its partners, and how these satellites measure the temperature of the ocean surface.
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IMPORTANT USER ALERT (2 July 2024): This past weekend, a storage server at NOAA's Center for Satellite Applications and Research, which delivers the NOAA Coral Reef Watch data, suffered a hardware failure. The issue is being addressed, and we hope to have the NOAA Coral Reef Watch data back up and running as soon as possible. (1) The most recent data will be made available first; historical data may take time to be restored. (2) If you need specific data that are not yet available, please contact us at coralreefwatch@noaa.gov. (3) If you use code to pull data, please revise your code to use “…/socd/…” in lieu of “…/sod/…” in all relevant web addresses for all future needs. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. |
