Marine Water Quality Dashboard

Sea-surface temperatures, chlorophyll, sediments and light

The eReefs Marine Water Quality dashboard was an interactive website that enabled access to a range of water-quality indicators for the Great Barrier Reef. It used near real-time data, and more than ten years of records of sea surface temperatures, chlorophyll levels, suspended sediments, and dissolved organic matter. Data from the Dashboard could be displayed in different formats (map, table or chart) and downloaded for further analysis and interpretation.

This website was created and hosted by the Bureau of Meteorology, and was released with some fanfare in March 2014 at a URL of http://www.bom.gov.au/marinewaterquality/.

The remote sensing data products available via the Marine Water Quality dashboard included ocean colour datasets derived from observations made by the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) sensor on board the NASA Aqua satellite, using an algorithm developed by CSIRO.

These datasets were updated in near-real-time mode by the Bureau of Meteorology for several years, while the CSIRO remote sensing team worked to migrate the ocean colour algorithm to work with alternate instrument datasets, since the MODIS AQUA instrument was already well past its design lifespan by 2015 and expected to cease operation by 2017. (It ended up living much longer than that, of course, but we didn’t know that at the time!)

By December 2020 the MODIS ocean-colour operations were no was no longer generating accurate results due to an increasing mismatch between the CSIRO ocean colour algorithm and the instrument’s current calibration. New versions of the algorithm were designed for the ESA Sentinel-3A and -3B OLCI instruments and so the MODIS-based datasets were stopped, and the Marine Water Quality dashboard was decommissioned.

Archived information about the eReefs Marine Water Quality Dashboard: