Sea Surface Temperature Warming Rates in Australian Marine Parks according to the SSTAARS

Brief description

This dataset measures the mean decadal warming rates of the sea surface temperature (SST) in 58 Australian Marine Parks (with the exception of the Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Park) over the past 25 years (1992 to 2016). They are derived from the Sea Surface Temperature Atlas of the Australian Regional Seas (SSTAARS). The field of “trend_d” represents the linear SST trend for March 1992 to December 2016. The unit of the warming rates is Celsius degree/per decade.

This research is supported by the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Marine Biodiversity Hub through Project D1.

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Maintenance and Update Frequency: notPlanned

Statement: The 25 years of SST data used to construct the atlas were one-day composites of night-only AVHRR SST (L3S-1day night) for the period 21 March 1992 to 31 December 2016 provided through the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS: http://www.imos.org.au). The data have been processed following international GHRSST protocols to help reduce instrument bias using in situ data, with only night-time nearly cloud-free data used to reduce diurnal bias and cloud contamination. A pixel-wise climatology (with four annual sinusoids) and linear trend are fit to the data using a robust technique. The resultant SST Atlas of Australian Regional Seas (SSTAARS) (Wijffels et al., 2018) has been used as input for this dataset. The linear trend statistics of the SSTAARS pixels within each Australian Marine Park were extracted and averaged to calculate the mean decadal warming rate of the marine park. Wijffels, S.E., Beggs, H., Griffin, C., Middleton, J.F., Cahill, M., King, E., Jones, E., Feng, M., Benthuysen, J.A., Steinberg, C.R., & Sutton, P. (2018). A fine spatial-scale sea surface temperature atlas of the Australian regional seas (SSTAARS): Seasonal variability and trends around Australasia and New Zealand revisited. Journal of Marine Systems, 187, 156-196