Satellite Coral Bleaching Products

Please be aware that NCDC has now combined this dataset in with NOAA Polar Orbiting Satellites, DS-3615 (C00573). Satellite Coral Bleaching Products is digital data set DSI-3621, archived at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). This is oceanographic satellite data, which is provided by the Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution (OSDPD) of the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). DSI-3621 includes the 50 km nighttime only Sea Surface Temperature (SST), SST anomaly, HotSpot and Degree Heating Weeks (DHWs). These products are designed to monitor and predict possible coral bleaching events. The HotSpot highlights regions of extreme warm water that can be harmful to coral reefs, where sea surface temperatures are at least 1 degree C above the maximum SST fromclimatology. The DHWs is allowed to accumulate when the HotSpot is above 1 degree C, and it is used to indicate the accumulated thermal stress that coral reefs experience. These satellite coral bleaching monitoring products are widely used and have been featured on national newscasts, National Geographic, public television, etc., and are extremely important to NOAA outreach to the public as well as coral reef and climate scientists and marine managers. The binary flat data file includes a header record and 12 data records. The header record is a 720 column integer (I x 2) array and contains the number of columns, number of rows, the oldest time of SST observations (month, day, year), the latest time of SST observations (month, day, year), starting Day of Year, current Day of Year, spatial resolution of grid points, minimum latitude, maximum latitude, minimum longitude, maximum longitude. The data record contains twelve integer arrays with dimensions of 720 x 331, which include nighttime only SST, SST anomaly, HotSpots, DHWs and the first and last Day of Year of HotSpots occur, number of observations, ages of most recent observation, reliability, physiographic descriptor and ice field. Currently, only NOAA-16 products are available in NCDC archive. These products are Level-4 products derived from the NESDIS 50 km nighttime only SST data. The climatology for SST anomalies, HotSpots and DHWs are derived from Multi-Channel SSTs (MCSSTs) reprocessed by the Rosenstiel Schoolof Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) of the University of Miami (Gleeson and Strong, 1995). These data are projected with the cylinder equal-distance projection. The satellite coral bleaching products are surface products that provide a global coverage. These data are produced twice a week and available since February 2003 at NCDC.