New NOAA Reef Products Available!
Added to website: 08 November 2007
NOAA Coral Reef Watch is pleased to announce two new products now
available on their website: an experimental expansion of our Satellite
Bleaching Alert system, and a webpage that links to remote sensing
datasets for coral reef managers. Both are available on their website:
http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite/current/
experimental_products.html.
Adding to our 24 operational sites, 33 new experimental Virtual
Stations have been implemented. These include many locations in the
Florida Keys, plus the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Special focus
was given to the Centre of Excellence sites designated under the
World Bank/GEF Coral Reef Targeted Research Program: Zanzibar,
Tanzania; Puerto Morelos, Mexico; Heron Island, Australia; and
Bolinao, Philippines. Each of these sites now has its own webpage,
with zoomed-in views of the CRW satellite bleaching data products and
time series graphs. For all of the new sites, users can sign up for
Satellite Bleaching Alert e-mails, automatically warning them when
bleaching conditions change in their location. These new Virtual
Stations are currently in an experimental phase, while we continue to
expand the network.
A new website has also been developed as a data portal to remote
sensing datasets that are freely available over the web. The focus
is on global, near-real-time data that would be useful for coral reef
managers and researchers around the world: e.g. sea surface
temperature and thermal stress, ocean surface winds, sea surface
height anomalies, precipitation, sea surface currents, etc. We tried
to include a variety of data formats, including easy-to-use imagery,
to meet a variety of user needs. This project is part of the Coral
Reef Targeted Research (CRTR) Program?s Remote Sensing Working
Group. The new resources are available at:
http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/crtr/data_resources.html
NB if the links dont pop up yet - they should do soon…and email Mark Eakin at mark.eakin@noaa.gov
