The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef
Watch (CRW) program has developed a daily global 5-km product suite based on satellite
observations to monitor thermal stress on coral reefs. These products fulfill requests from
coral reef managers and researchers for higher resolution products by taking advantage of
new satellites, sensors and algorithms. Improvements of the 5-km products over CRW’s
heritage global 50-km products are derived from: (1) the higher resolution and greater data
density of NOAA’s next-generation operational daily global 5-km geo-polar blended sea
surface temperature (SST) analysis; and (2) implementation of a new SST climatology
derived from the Pathfinder SST climate data record. The new products increase near-shore
coverage and now allow direct monitoring of 95% of coral reefs and significantly reduce
data gaps caused by cloud cover. The 5-km product suite includes SST Anomaly, Coral
Bleaching HotSpots, Degree Heating Weeks and Bleaching Alert Area, matching existing
CRW products. When compared with the 50-km products and in situ bleaching observations
for 2013–2014, the 5-km products identified known thermal stress events and matched
bleaching observations. These near reef-scale products significantly advance the ability of
coral reef researchers and managers to monitor coral thermal stress in near-real-time.
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