Impacts of sea surface temperature anomaly to the coverage area and early appearance time of green tide in the Yellow Sea

The massive green tide occurred in the summer of 2008 in the coastal waters of Qingdao where the Olympic sailing competitions will be held, drew much attention from the international community. A web-based green tide monitoring system was established to routinely monitor the coverage area of green tide using Floating Algae Index (FAI) and the marine environmental parameters in each summer since 2008. In this paper, the impacts of sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly to the coverage area and early appearance time of green tide in the YS from 2008 to 2013 were studied. The results show that the SST anomaly in March and April correlate with green tide maximum coverage area and their early appearance time. The positive SST anomaly tends to have the massive algae bloom and earlier appearance time while the negative SST anomaly tends to have the smaller algae bloom and late appearance time.