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A remote-sensing/GIS application for analysis of sea surface temperature off the western coast of North America
Citation:
Payne, M. C., D. REUSSER, H. LEE, II, AND C. A. BROWN. A remote-sensing/GIS application for analysis of sea surface temperature off the western coast of North America. Presented at 2010 Ocean Sciences Meeting, Portland, OR, February 22 - 26, 2010.
Impact/Purpose:
Recent work reports a warming trend in Pacific Ocean temperatures over the last 50 years.
Description:
Recent work reports a warming trend in Pacific Ocean temperatures over the last 50 years. Coastal regions along western North America are particularly sensitive to climatic change, an important indicator of which is sea surface temperature (SST). In situ SST measurements (typically buoy measurements), however, are irregular in both space and time. This generates a need for a satellite-derived SST product capable of covering as much coastline as possible while keeping resolution and file size reasonable. Therefore, selection and interpretation of appropriate data are important steps in providing a basis for climate change analyses in coastal and estuarine environments. Here we present a detailed data acquisition, processing, and interpretation scheme whereby Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) SST raster data from the Pathfinder Version 5.0 4 km series are imported and processed within the framework of a GIS in order to isolate sea surface temperature values along the western coast of North America. Our data represent a time-series of monthly mean temperatures over the last 24 years. Despite challenges related to cloud cover and land signal contamination at the coast-sea interface, analyses of spatial and temporal patterns of our coastal SST data set over this time period can reveal trends in susceptible coastal regions and their associated ecosystem services. For example, a preliminary analysis indicates a generally warmer temperature range occurring in Newport Bay, CA over the last 5 years (~ 6-10 °C) than during the previous two decades (~ 3-6 °C). Results of a similar evaluation of SST data off the Coos Bay, OR estuary are less conclusive, however. During the 24 year time period temperatures ranged from 8 to 12 °C in winter and 11 to 17 degrees in summer. As expected, the temperature variation between winter minimums and summer maximums is less for Coos Bay than for Newport Bay. However, there is no clear pattern suggesting increased warming over time in Coos Bay. Future work will probe the potential existence of SST patterns through space and time. Further analysis of these SST data will be used to relate existing distributions of near-coastal species in the Northeast Pacific to temperature regimes and then to develop models to predict potential changes in distributions in response to climate change.