Major upgrades in NOAA’s global coral bleaching prediction and monitoring

NOAA announced a major advance in predicting mass coral bleaching, providing the probability of bleaching up to four months ahead.

Using the new seasonal ecological forecast system, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch does not anticipate any large scale coral bleaching events in the Northern Hemisphere through October 2012.

NOAA has also significantly advanced near-real time satellite monitoring of the high ocean temperatures that can cause coral bleaching. A new generation version of NOAA’s product suite now provides daily 5-km satellite monitoring of coral bleaching thermal stress for reefs around the world. This represents 100 times finer resolution, more frequent observations, and more data than the current twice-weekly 50-km global satellite coral bleaching monitoring.