Sea Surface Warming Rates in 58 Australian Marine Parks

58 Australian Marine Parks have their sea surface temperature warming rates measured from 2003 to 2017. The dataset provides annual and monthly warming rates in degrees Celsius, derived from monthly MODIS (Aqua) satellite imagery. This research was supported by the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Marine Biodiversity Hub.

Use Cases

• Assessing climate change impacts on marine protected areas based on calculated warming rates.
• Comparing annual versus monthly warming trends across different parks using the 'slope_y' and 'slope_m' fields.
• Informing marine park management and conservation strategies with spatially explicit temperature change data.
• Validating or calibrating broader ocean climate models with localized, satellite-derived SST trends.

Strengths

• Covers a specific, policy-relevant set of 58 Australian Marine Parks.
• Provides a 15-year time series (2003-2017) derived from consistent MODIS (Aqua) satellite data.
• Includes both annual and monthly warming rate metrics for granular trend analysis.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, specific column names, license, and author are missing from all sources.
• The dataset excludes the Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Park, limiting complete national coverage.
• Update dates conflict between sources (2026-04-30 and 2026-04-20), raising questions about version control.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data, supported by the NESP Marine Biodiversity Hub (Project D1).

Collection Method

Derived from monthly MODIS (Aqua) sea surface temperature images.

Time Range

2003 to 2017

Freshness

2026-04-30 14:19:47.390878

Geography

58 Australian Marine Parks (excluding Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Park)