Validation and statistical analysis of the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature data in the Arabian Gulf

The combined effect of climate change and steadily increasing seawater demand for industrial and domestic purposes in the Arabian Gulf region has a significant impact on the ecosystem in this region. Additionally, this effect may reduce the efficiency and increase the operating costs of industrial facilities that utilize seawater for cooling and other purposes. In this context, it is important to know various statistical characteristics of the sea surface temperature (SST) and their trends, in addition to the mean climatological characteristics. The analysis conducted in this study utilized a 17-year Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Level 4 dataset of 0.01 x 0.01 degrees spatial resolution. First, the dataset was compared against a 2-year seawater temperature measurements at the ten offshore buoys in the relatively shallow coastal waters of the United Arab Emirates between Ras Ghumais and Dubai, which showed a reasonably good agreement between the two datasets, with the estimated root mean square deviations ranging from 0.5 to 0.9 degrees C. Subsequently, several statistical SST characteristics were calculated. The trend analysis showed not only positive tendencies in the mean SSTs of up to 0.08 degrees C/year in the northern Gulf, but also the trends in the annual percentile exceedances, particularly the 95 th percentiles (near-maximum SSTs), which increased by approximately 0.07 degrees C/year in the western United Arab Emirates and eastern Qatar waters. On the contrary, the 5th percentiles (near-minimum SSTs) decreased by up to 0.1 degrees C/year, es-pecially in the waters around Bahrain, Qatar, and the western United Arab Emirates. These results indicate that extreme hot and cold SST events in the Gulf are becoming more frequent and more extreme than before. (c) 2021 Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

The combined effects of climate change and increasing seawater demand in the Arabian Gulf region have significant impacts on the ecosystem. Long-term trends and changes in SST, in particular the exceedances of percentiles, have been found to be more pronounced in the Gulf region.