Abstract
Sea surface temperature (SST) is one of the most important parameters in monitoring ecosystem health in the marine and coastal environment. Coastal ecosystem is largely dependent on ambient temperature and temperature fronts for marine/coastal habitat and its sustainability. Hence, thermal pollution is seen as a severe threat for ecological health of coastal waters across the world. Mumbai is one of the largest metropolises of the world and faces severe domestic and industrial effluent disposal problem, of which thermal pollution is a major issue with policy-makers and environmental stakeholders. This study attempts to understand the long-term SST variation in the coastal waters off Mumbai, on the western coast of India, and to identify thermal pollution zones. Analysis of SST trends in the near-coastal waters for the pre- and post-monsoon seasons from the year 2004 to the year 2010 has been carried out using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) Thermal Infra-red (TIR) bands. SST is calculated with the help of bands 31 and 32 using split window method. Several statistical operations were then applied to find the seasonal averages in SST and the standard deviation of SST in the study area. Maximum variation in SST was found within a perpendicular distance of 5 km from the shoreline during the study period. Also, a warm water mass was found to form consistently off coast during the winter months. Several anthropogenic sources of thermal pollution could be identified which were found to impact various locations along the coast.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are indebted to the Environmental Improvement Society (Mumbai Metropolitan Region) and Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) for the research grant provided for this work. Special thanks are to NASA for data support. The MODIS Terra data is courtesy of the online Data Pool at the NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), USGS/Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/data_access). The authors are grateful to Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, for providing the infrastructure.
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Azmi, S., Agarwadkar, Y., Bhattacharya, M. et al. Monitoring and trend mapping of sea surface temperature (SST) from MODIS data: a case study of Mumbai coast. Environ Monit Assess 187, 165 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-015-4386-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-015-4386-9