New virtual stations and remote sensing resources from NOAA Coral Reef Watch

From the Coral-List listserve:

NOAA Coral Reef Watch is pleased to announce two new products now available on our 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 at: 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 [also] available at: http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/crtr/data_resources.html

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C. Mark Eakin, Ph.D.
Coordinator, NOAA Coral Reef Watch
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Center for Satellite Applications and Research
Satellite Oceanography & Climate Division
e-mail: mark.eakin@noaa.gov
url: coralreefwatch.noaa.gov

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