Dataset Card: NOAA Coral Reef Watch — 5km Bleaching Heat-Stress Products
Dataset Card: NOAA Coral Reef Watch — 5km Bleaching Heat-Stress Products
Status: draft, awaiting maintainer review. Products, access paths, and public-domain status checked against NOAA Coral Reef Watch documentation on 2026-06-11. This is the spine of the Reef Guardian.
What it is
NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) operates satellite-based monitoring of coral-reef thermal stress. Its daily global 5km (v3.1) product suite turns sea surface temperature into the earliest legible warning of bleaching risk. These are the signals a reef guardian watches.
Products
| Product | What it means |
|---|---|
| Sea Surface Temperature (SST) & SST Anomaly | Current temperature and departure from normal |
| Coral Bleaching HotSpot | Where SST exceeds the local bleaching threshold |
| Degree Heating Week (DHW) | Accumulated heat stress over the prior 12 weeks — the key bleaching-risk metric |
| Bleaching Alert Area (BAA, 7-day max) | Categorical alert level (No Stress → Watch → Warning → Alert Level 1/2…) derived from DHW |
| SST Trend, Regional Virtual Stations | Longer-term trend; per-reef time series |
Time series extend back to 1985 for most products.
Access
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Provider | NOAA / NESDIS / STAR Coral Reef Watch |
| Docs | CRW 5km products |
| Formats | NetCDF4 |
| Delivery | FTP, HTTP, THREDDS, and ERDDAP servers (e.g. dataset noaacrwbaa7dDaily on coastwatch.noaa.gov/erddap; NOAA_DHW on coastwatch.pfeg.noaa.gov/erddap) |
| Auth | None — free download and use |
License and reuse
NOAA Coral Reef Watch products are U.S. Government works in the public domain and freely accessible for research and management. Attribution to NOAA Coral Reef Watch is expected as good practice.
Fields
Gridded (5km) values per product: latitude, longitude, time, and the product variable (e.g. CRW_BAA, CRW_DHW, CRW_SST). The BAA categorical levels are the values a guardian translates into plain-language alerts.
Limitations and ethics
- A single warm week is not a bleaching event. DHW measures accumulated stress; report alert levels exactly as CRW defines them and never invent a forecast beyond the product.
- Satellite SST has limitations in shallow, turbid, or nearshore reef environments; treat 5km grid cells as regional, not site-precise.
- No wildlife-location sensitivity (environmental grid), so ethics review is not applicable to the dataset itself — but a reef guardian's outputs still follow ETHICS.md.
How it's used in the commons
The alert and ocean-state source for Reef Guardians (Ocean Intelligence System), and the evidence base for reef region briefings. Connector spec: integrations/coral-reef-watch.md.
Sources (3)
Every claim in this artifact traces to one of the citations below. Anything that could not be sourced was left out.
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Image: Jstuby at en.wikipedia / CC0
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