Tag: CIMAS

Coral colonies at Cheeca Rocks in the Florida Keys show evidence of bleaching. Image credit: NOAA

AOML Leads Research Efforts Across Caribbean to Improve Bleaching Predictions

For the third time in recorded history, a massive coral bleaching event is unfolding throughout the world’s oceans, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean. Above average sea surface temperatures exacerbated by a strong El Niño could result in the planet losing up to 4,500 square miles of coral this year alone, according to NOAA. The global event is predicted to continue to impact reefs into the spring of 2016.

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Illustration of increased trade winds in the Pacific and Indian Oceans during the recent warming hiatus, which increased the inter-ocean pressure gradient and thus enhanced Indonesian throughflow. This resulted in an abrupt increase of Indian Ocean heat content. Image credit: NOAA/CIMAS

Indian Ocean Plays Key Role in Global Warming Hiatus

The earth is warming, but temperatures in the atmosphere and at the sea surface that steadily rose in the last half-century have leveled off and slowed in the past decade, causing the appearance of an imbalance in Earth’s heat budget. Scientists are looking into the deep ocean to determine where this additional heat energy could be stored, and recently traced a pathway that leads to the Indian Ocean.

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Projected timing in years of the onset of annual severe bleaching for the Florida Reef Tract and the Bahamas at ~11 km resolution. Note that regions in red and orange, such as the Dry Tortugas, are projected to bleach annually starting in the early 2030s, while the more northern stretch of the Florida Keys near Biscayne Bay, are projected to bleach annually in the mid-2040s.

Study Provides Local-scale Projections of Coral Bleaching Over the Next 100 Years

In a new study published April 1 in Global Change Biology, NOAA oceanographers and colleagues have developed a new method to produce high-resolution projections of the range and onset of severe annual coral bleaching for reefs in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean

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