Experts from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) developed a portal to monitor the appearance and advance of sargassum in the Caribbean Sea and the coasts of Quintana Roo.
It is a problem related to climate change, ocean acidification and the amount of nutrients that are dumped as pollutants into the seas. It represents an environmental, economic and tourist problem.
Specialists from the Institutes of Geography (IGg), Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Change (ICAyCC); as well as Marine Sciences and Limnology (ICMyL) of UNAM work in a multidisciplinary way to address the complexity of the phenomenon.
The study area covers the coast of Quintana Roo and 230 kilometers offshore, extending to Belize, Guatemala and part of Honduras.
The images generated by the portal are freely accessible, coming from the Sentinel-2 satellite of the European Space Agency.
In the university portal (sargazo.lanot.unam.mx), available to the public free of charge, 18 Sentinel-2 images are used, obtained every five days, which cover an approximate area of 150 thousand square kilometers.
The experts made a model of ocean currents to monitor and predict the arrival of sargassum to the coasts.
A detection algorithm allows scientists to know the presence or absence of sargassum, data that can be compared with a real and visible image.
Reference-aristeguinoticias.com
