Y.V.B. Sarma¹ , Anesh Govender¹ , Ebenezer S. Nyadjro² , Sergey Piontkovski¹

1. College of Agricultural and Marine Science, Sultan Qaboos University, P.O. Box.34, Al Khod, P.C. 123, Muscat, Oman
2. NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, 7600 Sandpoint Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115, USA
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Marine Science, 2013, Vol. 3, No. 18   doi: 10.5376/ijms.2013.03.0018
Received: 08 Apr., 2013    Accepted: 19 Apr., 2013    Published: 22 Apr., 2013

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Sarma et al., 2013, Long-term Changes in Sea Surface Temperature at Selected Locations in the Sea of Oman and the Arabian Sea off Oman, International Journal of Marine Science, Vol.3, No.18 145-150 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2013.03.0018)

Long-term changes in the sea surface temperature (SST) at two locations off Oman were investigated using Hadley Center SST for the period 1961~2009. A mean annual increase in SST by 0.32℃ was noticed in the Sea of Oman while an increase of 0.53℃ was noticed in the western Arabian Sea. The shift in SST is higher off Muscat than off Masirah during the study period. The bi-modal variability of the SST in the study region is successfully simulated by a cyclic model developed utilizing SST data for 1961~2009 period. An increase in summer warming and decrease in winter cooling are evident in the annual SST distribution at both the locations. The decadal variability off Masirah in the western Arabian Sea showed that the standard deviation of SST switched its character post-1990. The SST variance in Sea of Oman showed a decadal-scale change but in western Arabian Sea, it was nearly unchanged until 1990 and rapidly declined post-1990 period. The large shifts in SST apparently caused higher variability in the sea surface height (SSH) anomalies post-1990 period. 

Sea of Oman; Western Arabian Sea; Sea surface temperature; Sea level changes; Long-term SST change