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Intercomparison of satellite derived SST with logger data in the Caribbean – Implications for coral reef monitoring
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Authors
Georgios Margaritis 
,
Elizabeth C. Kent ,
Gavin L Foster
Abstract
Since the early 1980s measurements of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) derived from satellite-borne instruments have provided a wide range of global gridded products documenting changes in SST. However, there are many sources of uncertainty in these records and significant differences exist among them. One use of these products is identification of coral bleaching events, and the predictions of the impact of future warming on coral reefs. This relies on an understanding of how temperatures near reefs as recorded by SST products differ from the in-situ SST experienced by the corals. This difference is a combination of real spatio-temporal variations, differences in product resolution and errors in the products. This paper investigates the relationship between the local temperature measured in-situ by loggers at coral sites in the western tropical Atlantic and two high resolution satellite SST products. Using differences among ESA SST CCI v2.1 (ESA2), NOAA CoralTemp (CT) SST products and in-situ logger data from coral reefs, an assessment of the satellite products with focus on coral reef monitoring is carried out. Discrepancies between the two products can be large, especially in coastal areas and for the hottest and coldest months when there is a particular risk of bleaching. By comparison to the stable ESA2 product, CT was found to overestimate the rise in SST by as much as 0.20 °C per decade. In almost all cases SSTs from ESA2 were more consistent with temperatures measured near the corals than those from CT.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31223/X52H7V
Subjects
Environmental Sciences
Keywords
satellite SST, ESA CCI, CoralTemp, CRW, in-situ validation, coral reef monitoring, Coral Bleaching, Caribbean
Dates
Published: 2024-08-06 05:33
Last Updated: 2024-08-06 12:33
License
CC BY Attribution 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Data Availability (Reason not available):
• The ESA2 data used in the analysis were downloaded by the web catalogue: Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) (2019): Sea surface temperature daily data from 1981 to present derived from satellite observations. Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Climate Data Store (CDS). DOI: 10.24381/cds.cf608234 (Accessed on 13-10-2023). Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains.
• The CT v3.1 data used here were downloaded on 13-10-2023 from:
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/pub/sod/mecb/crw/data/coraltemp/v3.1/nc/
As of July the 2nd 2024, 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 was still being addressed at the time of submission.
• The Florida temperature logger data are publicly available for download in: https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/data-release/doi-F71C1TZK/.
• The Belize temperature logger data were provided by Karl D. Castillo and will be made publicly available before publication.
• The data used for Figure 1f were generated using the re-gridding service provided by the Surface Temperature Group at the University of Reading, UK (https://surftemp.net) using data from the ESA Climate Change Initiative and the SST CCI project.
Embury, O., Merchant, C.J., Good, S.A., Rayner, N.A., Høyer, J.L., Atkinson, C., Block, T., Alerskans, E., Pearson, K.J., Worsfold, M., McCarroll, N., Donlon, C. Satellite-based time-series of sea-surface temperature since 1980 for climate applications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03147-w
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare no competing interests.
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