The Chesapeake Bay's waters are warming, in some places more rapidly than the region's air temperatures, researchers from the University of Maryland say. If unchecked, scientists say, the trend could complicate costly, long-running efforts to restore the ailing estuary, worsen fish-suffocating dead zones and alter the food web on which the bay's fish and crabs depend.

Drawing on remote sensing by satellites, researchers at Maryland's Center for Environmental Science found that water temperatures have risen since the 1980s across more than 92 percent of the Chesapeake and its river tributaries. The study appeared in the October issue of the journal Remote Sensing of Environment.

The increase averaged nearly 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, according to Andrew J. Elmore, co-author of the study and a geologist at the center's Appalachian laboratory in Frostburg.

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