Coral reefs are one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth and provide significant ecological, economic, and societal benefits valued at approximately $9.8 trillion U.S. dollars per year. While there are multiple ways humans threaten coral reefs, climate change has become the single most important of these threats. NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch is the only program that operationally issues coral bleaching forecasts, using near real-time satellite monitoring to provide ecological nowcasting of the ocean heat stress that can cause mass coral bleaching and using climate models to forecast the potential for bleaching months into the future. Ocean temperatures began to rise in mid-2014, starting what turned out to be three full years of marine heatwaves that caused corals to bleach — expelling their symbiotic algae. When the film team at Exposure Labs started exploring how to film coral bleaching as it happened, Coral Reef Watch was an obvious partner. Exposure Labs worked with numerous scientists, including me as a Co-Chief Scientific Advisor, to get the science behind the Sundance-Award Winning film Chasing Coral correct. The film team went to great extremes to ensure every statistic, graph, scientific principle, and animation was clear and accurate – using science to explain and support the adventure of trying to capture the first on-reef time-lapse imagery of this important phenomenon. The result is a visually compelling film that tells the story of climate change and its impacts on an important ecosystem in a way that appeals to audiences, including viewers who usually would not sit down to watch a climate change documentary. Chasing Coralis an extremely effective combination of science and art that opens opportunities for dialogue on climate change in ways no scientific paper ever could.

Coral reefs are one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth and provide significant ecological, economic, and societal benefits valued at approximately $9.8 trillion U.S. dollars per year. Since 1997, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch (CRW) has used near real-time satellite monitoring to provide ecological nowcasting of the ocean heat stress that can cause mass coral bleaching. While this benefitted coral reef managers, scientists, and other stakeholders, our users desired longer-range forecasts. In 2012, CRW launched its probabilistic, global Four-Month Coral Bleaching Outlook system based on NOAA’s operational Climate Forecast System (now CFSv2). The Outlook proved accurate in local bleaching events over the following two years. Subsequently, June 2014-May 2017 brought the longest, most widespread, and probably most damaging coral bleaching event on record. As this global event greatly threatened all tropical coral reefs, the Outlook system proved critical in helping users worldwide prepare for and respond to bleaching – including actions to reduce damage from these intense marine heatwaves. This presentation will introduce CRW’s ecoforecasting tools and focus on four “use cases” of CRW’s Outlook system during the 2014-17 global coral bleaching event. In 2015, concern over bleaching forecasted by CRW’s Outlooks prompted two actions by the State of Hawaii. First, the “Eyes of the Reef” volunteer network organized numerous training sessions and its first state-wide Bleach Watch “Bleachapalooza” event to monitor bleaching across the state. Second, State scientists collected specimens of rare corals to preserve them in onshore nurseries. One of these species is now locally extinct on Hawaii’s reefs, and these rescued specimens are being prepared for re-introduction. Next, as CRW predicted bleaching would persist for several months in the Northern Line Islands, NOAA mounted a special cruise to monitor these remote coral reefs. The record heat stress killed over 98% of the corals at Jarvis Island. Finally, in 2016, prior to peak bleaching, Thailand used CRW’s prediction of severe heat stress to close ten heavily used coral reefs to tourism as a way to reduce further stress to the reefs. These actions show the value of ecoforecasts to prepare resource managers for further climate change impacts.