| Long-term detection of coral reef thermal stress events using daily satellite data in the Red Sea |
| Paper ID : 1106-ICRSSSA-FULL |
| Authors |
|
Mostafa Atef Soliman Khaled *1, Frank Muller-Karger2, Ahmad Hamed Obuid-Allah3, Mahmoud Hussien Mohammed Ahmed4, sameh bakr elkafrawy5 1Marine Science ,National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences , Cairo, Egypt 2Institute for Marine Remote Sensing/IMaRS College of Marine Science University of South Florida 3Zoology, Faculty of Science, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt 4Marine Science , National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Science, Cairo, Egypt 5Marine Science, National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, Cairo, Egypt |
| Abstract |
| Coral reefs are facing many challenges globally, especially adaptation to global warming. Investigating distributional changes of thermal stress has become an extensive research topic, aiming to help stakeholders adapt to future climate-driven changes. The relationship of time series analysis between sea surface temperature and coral reef bleaching increases our understanding on the coral reef health at the Egyptian Red Sea. Fourteen years of a high-resolution (1km) daily satellite-derived (MODIS-A) sea surface temperature (SST) are used to analyses the thermal stress, degree of heating week (DHW) and annual patterns of SST variability in the Egyptian Red Sea. Long term of daily data was processed using MATLAB code script to calculate the average, climatology, anomalies, thermal stress, maximum, minimum and DHW. The total mean proportion of dead and bleached corals was gradually increased from 2013 to 2015 for all studied cities. The present paper obtained that the three years of the total observed bleaching was positively correlated with sea surface temperature at all studied cities (r=0.71, 0.96, 0.89 and 0.88) at Ras Ghareb, Hurghada, Qusier and Marsa Alam respectively. The accumulated DHW resulted that there are four thermal stress events during 14 years in 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2012. The annual analysis shows a general upward trend of sea surface temperature at the study area. |
| Keywords |
| Climate change; Coral Bleaching; MODIS-A; SST; DHW |
| Status: Accepted (Oral Presentation) |
