MCR LTER: Coral Reef: Benthic Water Temperature, ongoing since 2005

First Year: 

2005

Last Year: 

2023
A continuous time series of benthic water temperature is measured with bottom-mounted thermistors at six sites around the shores of Moorea, on the fringing reef, backreef, and forereef. The forereef temperature is recorded with SBE 39s or SBE 56s at 10, 20, 30 and 40 m, starting between 2005 to 2007, except FOR00 starting in 2010. These are ongoing except the 40 m deployments were discontinued after August 2019. The backreef SBE 39s/56s are mounted on plates at 1 m depth at LTER 1 and at 2 m depth at the other five sites. Onset HOBOs are deployed on the fringing reef at one shallow 1 m depth and one deeper depth varying by site as follows: 6 m at LTER 1, 4 m at LTER 2, 7 m at LTER 3, 6 m at LTER 4, 3 m at LTER 5 and 4 m at LTER 6. The mounting plate is fixed to the reef and depths do not vary through time. These depths are not measured by the thermistors and should be considered categorical. Throughout the timeseries, temperature measurements have been taken every 2 minutes by SBE 39s and SBE 56s, and every 8 minutes by the Onset HOBOs. Prior to July 2021 temperature data were subjected to a low-pass filter to remove noise and temperature was resampled to a 20 minute time step. Beginning in July 2021 data are raw temperature values sampled every two minutes (SBE 39s and SBE 56s) or eight minutes (Onset HOBOs) depending on the instrument.

Package Type: 

Signature

Topic: 

Physical Oceanographic

Core Research Areas: 

Disturbance

Keywords: 

Temperature, Water Temperature, Disturbance, Bio-Physical Coupling