[Coral-List] CHAMP Portal gains new data source, more virtual stations

[Mike Jankulak]

The Coral Health and Monitoring Program (CHAMP) is pleased to announce
the preliminary integration of a new data source into our CHAMP Portal
online data query tool:  Optimally Interpolated Sea Surface
Temperatures, or OISSTs, from microwave satellite sources. These data
are sourced from Remote Sensing Systems (remss.com) and are described in
detail here:

http://www.remss.com/measurements/sea-surface-temperature/oisst-description

As of this writing, "fully processed" OISST files are available from
January 1, 1998 through February 28, 2014. Data more recent than this
are considered "interim" and may be reprocessed and refined multiple
times after initial posting.  These Remote Sensing data are distinct
from the long-term climate data record OISST of Reynolds et al.  In
particular, these are "foundation sea temperature" estimates, using a
one-dimensional model of diurnal warming based on wind and insolation to
correct for daytime warming within each pixel of the global dataset.

The CHAMP Portal was first released to the public in March of 2014 and
can be found here:

http://www.coral.noaa.gov/champportal

Prior to the integration of OISST data the CHAMP Portal included 54
sites, 14 of which reported data from in situ instrumentation (past or
present) and the rest of which were termed "virtual stations."  Virtual
stations are locations of interest throughout the world's coral habitats
for which remotely-sensed data products are available.  Often, these
locations are selected to be virtual forerunners of on-site observation
platforms to be deployed at a later date.

Integration of the Remote Sensing Systems OISSTs has enabled us to add
an additional 92 virtual stations to the CHAMP Portal, for a current
total of 146 sites, in situ and virtual.

At present CHAMP is loading SSTs from the MW (microwave) OISST data
collection, i.e. not including IR (infrared) data sources.  Future
extensions of the CHAMP Portal data feeds will process the MW_IR OISST
data as well as data from other sources, and additional virtual sites
(locations t.b.d.) will be created and back-populated with all available
data.

Feedback about the CHAMP Portal is always welcome at
<champ at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>, or can be sent to me directly.