Hot Spot Detection of Seawater Temperature Change in the Southern Sea of Korea

Abstract

Due to the global warming, worldwide climatic change has been deepening recently.Seawater temperature rising and acidification of ocean due to the climate change have a great influence such as the change of marine ecosystem. Therefore, this research mainly focused on understanding change of seawater temperature in the Southern sea of Korea, especially detecting hot spot where shows distinctive changeable aspect. As a first step of this research, database of seawater temperature collected by National Fisheries Research and Development Institute bimonthly from 1980 to 2007 was constructed. Using constructed database, regression analysis was carried out to grasp temporal gradients. As a result, inclination of regression of equation, rates of change in study area, was calculated. After then, seawater temperature point maps for each observation points werecreated. Applying these maps to spatial estimation technique, raster maps were created. Temperature point maps of whole study area were created using raster maps. And polygon files were created with a size of 20×20㎞. Each polygon has a value of average rate of changes of temperature points in that polygon. Lastly, hot spot was detected and GI* statistics providing numerical values which show clustering aspects were calculated using polygon files. In this research, it was possible to detect the area where an appreciable seawater temperature change appears in the Southern sea of Korea. Andthis research also expected to contribute to research marine ecosystem induced by global warming and climate change in the future.