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. 2019 Aug 12;7:e7473. doi: 10.7717/peerj.7473

Figure 1. Sea surface temperature (SST) time series of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).

Figure 1

(B–C) show the average SST of all grid boxes in the weekly NOAA OI-SSTv1 or monthly HadISST dataset covering the entire GBR from 1982 to 2017. The vertical axes are restricted to >27.5 °C to highlight summertime temperatures. Red background coloring indicates the years of severe mass coral bleaching reported in the GBR (1998, 2002, 2016, and 2017). The horizontal blue dashed lines indicate the maximum GBR-wide SST in each dataset. On average across the GBR, the highest temperatures of the satellite era were reached in 2004 (note that this does not mean 2004 was the warmest summer everywhere on the GBR; see spatial analyses below). (A) shows the summertime Marine Heatwave (MHW) index as defined by Hobday et al. (2018). Category 2 (“Strong”) heatwaves occurred GBR-wide in 1998, 2002, and 2004.