(Update: April 15, 2024)
On April 15, 2024, NOAA confirmed the world has been experiencing a global coral bleaching event. Bleaching-level heat stress, as remotely monitored and predicted by NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW), has been -- and continues to be -- extensive across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean basins.
Since early 2023, mass bleaching of coral reefs has been confirmed throughout the tropics, including in Florida; the Caribbean; Brazil; the eastern Tropical Pacific (including Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia); Australia's Great Barrier Reef; large areas of the South Pacific (including Fiji, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Samoas, and French Polynesia); the Red Sea (including the Gulf of Aqaba); the Persian Gulf; the Gulf of Aden; Tanzania; Kenya; Mauritius; the Seychelles; Tromelin; Mayotte; and off the western coast of Indonesia.
This is the fourth global coral bleaching event on record (following the 1998, 2010, and 2014-2017 global events), and the second in the last 10 years. The 2014-17 global event is considered the longest, most widespread, and the most damaging coral bleaching event on record. However, the ongoing global bleaching event is expected to surpass the extent and severity of the prior global event, in the weeks ahead, as the percentage of the world's coral reefs (i.e., satellite pixels containing coral reefs), which have experienced bleaching-level heat stress, continues to increase.
As NOAA and its partners work to document the extent and severity of the mass bleaching on coral reefs around the world, the current global coral bleaching event also provides an opportunity for NOAA CRW to compare field data of coral bleaching and mortality with its operational daily global 5km-resolution satellite coral bleaching heat stress data products, to help improve product performance, where possible, for our extensive and diverse user community worldwide. To do this, we need your help!
**To contribute coral bleaching data and observations (including reports of NO bleaching) to our ongoing effort, please do the following:**
1. E-mail your data files (in Excel, Word, etc.) directly to coralreefwatch@noaa.gov, OR
2. Enter your data into Coral Reef Watch's Google Form, OR
3. Download Coral Reef Watch's quantitative observations questionnaire (below), enter your data, and e-mail the completed questionnaire to coralreefwatch@noaa.gov.
NOAA Coral Reef Watch Quantitative Observations Questionnaire
(Excel spreadsheet, 13kb, Revised Sep 05, 2023)
What Can We All Do?
Predictions pose a daunting future, where even the most conservative estimates suggest mass coral bleaching could occur annually on the majority of coral reefs worldwide by 2050. Increased collaboration among coral reef stakeholders is vital given the critical state of reefs all over the world, and their ecological, economic and societal benefits. In addition to reducing local threats to coral reefs, galvanizing global urgency and action to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (i.e., the root cause of rapid anthropogenic climate change) is critical to strengthen conservation and restoration efforts.
