Environmental Datasets

Created by Andrew Freebairn
Last updated: 17 Mar 2022

Australia has approximately 35,500 km of coastline, large sections of which are occupied by mangroves particularly in the tropical and subtropical regions. The distribution and characteristics of mangroves is controlled primarily by climate, the geomorphology of the coastal zone and, to a certain extent, lithology and the composition and dynamics of coastal vegetation communities, including the mangroves themselves.

A large number of marine and terrestrial environmental datasets are available over varying spatial scales and temporal frequencies for Australia and the integration of these is highly beneficial to understanding the states and dynamics of mangroves around the Australian coastline. TERN is providing links to these data to enable scientists to understand the drivers and impacts of change.

The marine and near coastal environment has a major impact on mangrove states and conditions, with these including:

Sea Level Anomalies Oct2015

 

  • Sea level (local to global)

  • Sea surface tempurature

  • Tidal inundation

    • The National Tidal Centre (formerly the National Tidal Facility) is reponsible for sea level monitoring and analysis for the purpose of deriving trends in absolute sea level and producing national tide predictions, tide streams and related information. The NTC is the primary source of tide tables, tidal streams and tidal constituents provided to the Australian Hydrographic Service. The NTC also manages the national data archive for sea levels and tides. They hold the great majority of Australian historical tide gauge data and also maintain, and process and archive data from, two modern arrays of high quality acoustic tide gauges - the Australian Baseline array (ABSLMP) and the Pacific array (SPSLCMP). http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_data_ntc.html

  • Sea level pressure

    • The National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Sea Level Pressure is a gridded analysis of SLP based on land station reports, covering 1899 to present for latitudes 30°N-90°N. Quality controlled raw data plus empirical corrections for changes in instrumentation and station location. https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/ncar-sea-level-pressure

  • Ocean currents

  • Salinity

The distribution, structure and diversity of Australian mangrove ecosystems is determined and influenced by climate, and particularly temperature and rainfall. Mangrove species diversity broadly declines with increasing latitude from a maximum of 39 species in the Wet Tropics Bioregion to 1-2 in drier regions and southern range extremities (i.e., Avicennia marina). Rainfall is generally higher on the coastal margins although highly variable and, in the northern regions, occurs mainly in the summer months, largely because of monsoon systems. This frequently results in high humidity and frequent flooding. Further south, rainfall is greatest in the winter months as frontal systems are more frequent. The tropical regions in the north of Australia is subject to both severe cyclone events. This regions is also subject to climatic variability which can contribute to fluctuations in sea level, which can exceed several tens of centimeters in this region.

Information on weather and climate, where available, can be accessed through the links below.

Temperature

Rainfall

Humidity

Cyclones and tropical storms

  • Time series of tropical cyclone "best track" position and intensity data are provided for all ocean basins where tropical cyclones occur. Position and intensity data are available at 6-hourly intervals over the duration of each cyclone's life. The general period of record begins in 1851, but this varies by ocean basin. See the inventories for data availability specific to each basin. This data set was received as a revision to an NCDC tropical cyclone data set, with data generally available through the late 1990s. Since then, the set is being continually updated from the U.S. NOAA National Hurricane Center and the U.S. Navy Joint Typhoon Warning Center best track archives. https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds824.1/