The 2015/16 ENSO event increased the temperature of waters surrounding northeast Australia to above 30 °C, with large patches of water reaching 32 °C, for over two months, which led to severe bleaching of corals of the Northern Great Barrier Reef (NGBR). This study provides evidence gained from remote-sensing data, oceanographic data and oceanographic modeling, that three factors caused this excessive heating, namely: 1) the shutdown of the North Queensland Coastal Current, which would otherwise have flushed and cooled the Northern Coral Sea and the NGBR through tidal mixing 2) the advection of warm (>30 °C) water from the Gulf of Carpentaria eastward through Torres Strait and then southward over the NGBR continental shelf, and 3) presumably local solar heating. The eastward flux of this warm water through Torres Strait was driven by a mean sea level difference on either side of the strait that in turn was controlled by the wind, which also generated the southward advection of this warm water onto the NGBR shelf. On the NGBR shelf, the residence time of this warm water was longer inshore than offshore, and this may explain the observed cross-shelf gradient of coral bleaching intensity. The fate of the Great Barrier Reef is thus controlled by the oceanography of surrounding seas.

Interaction of tidal flow with a complex topography and bathymetry including headlands, islands, coral reefs and shoals create a rich submesoscale field of tidal jets, vortices, unsteady wakes, lee eddies and free shear layers, all of which impact marine ecology. A unique and detailed view of the submesoscale variability in a part of the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, Australia, that includes a number of small islands was obtained by using a “stereo” pair of 2-m-resolution visible-band images that were acquired just 54 s apart by the WorldView-3 satellite. Near-surface current and vorticity were extracted at a 50-m-resolution from those data using a cross-correlation technique and an optical-flow method, each yielding a similar result. The satellite-derived data are used to test the ability of the second-generation Louvain-la-Neuve ice-ocean model (SLIM), an unstructured-mesh, finite element model for geophysical and environmental flows, to reproduce the details of the currents in the region. The model succeeds in simulating the large-scale (> 1 km) current patterns, such as the main current and the width and magnitude of the jets developing in the gaps between the islands. Moreover, the order of magnitude of the vorticity and the occurrence of some vortices downstream of the islands are correctly reproduced. The smaller scales (< 500 m) are resolved by the model, although various discrepancies with the data are observed. The smallest scales (< 50 m) are unresolved by both the model- and image-derived velocity fields. This study shows that high-resolution models are able to a significant degree to simulate accurately the currents close to a rugged coast. Very-high-resolution satellite oceanography stereo images offer a new way to obtain snapshots of currents near a complex topography that has reefs, islands and shoals, and is a potential resource that could be more widely used to assess the predictive ability of coastal circulation models.