On Tuesday February 26th, PhD student Hana Al-Rashed gave a special coastal seminar on the first objective of her thesis titled “Three decades of urban coastal water SSTs along Kuwait’s south eastern coast”.
In the context of global warming, Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs), coastal areas have shown a rising trend ten times faster than the global rate. This rise is the product of three drivers which operate at different scales: global (such as greenhouse gases), regional (such as input from surface runoff) and local (mainly anthropogenic based, short on temporal scale and only influential up to 30Km such as desalinization plants).
The research Hana Al-Rashed is undertaking focuses on temperature change in the shallow waters along Kuwait’s south eastern coast between 2003 and 2017. Using satellite and buoy data, Al-Rashed found that the Kuwait’s bay SST is influenced by all three scales of drivers: globally from the Indian Ocean, regionally from the Arabian gulf and locally, from the bay’s coastline itself.
During the talk, Hana explained that, by observing the temperature trends, it could be noticed that all air and water temperature anomalies evaluated had increasing trends consistent with global ones indicating the influence of global events such as El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). She also explained that further research will explore the level of impact the Urban Heat Island effect may have on the observed SST trends in the study area.
This study will show the level of impact the rapid expansion of human development has on arid climate and its coastline so we are looking forward to see what the final outcomes of Hana’s thesis are.