Ocean heat waves predicted to increase, putting our coasts at risk

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-02-04 03:00

Australia; International; TAS

The intensity of ocean heatwaves and the number of days each year that they occur are both predicted to increase in the future climate, putting large marine ecosystems at risk, according to Australian and international research. Large marine ecosystems account for 95 per cent of global fisheries catches, but previous climate models have not looked at this sort of ecosystem scale. With sea temperatures expected to rise generally under climate change, the researchers looked specifically at the impact of heatwaves above this background the long-term trend. They found that the intensity and annual days of ocean heatwaves will be higher over most large marine ecosystems and that these heatwaves pose a serious threat, even if the species living there could adapt to the background long-term warming.

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Journal/
conference: Nature Climate Change

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: CSIRO, Ocean University of China, China

Funder: X.G. and Y.G. are supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC1404101), National Natural Science Foundation of China (42122039) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (202072001). S.Z. is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC1404104). The analysis was performed using the computing resources of the Center for High Performance Computing and System Simulation, Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (Qingdao). This research is completed through and supported by the International Laboratory for High Resolution Earth System Prediction (iHESP). L.W. is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFC1509100). P.C. acknowledges the support of the NSF Convergence Accelerator Program grant no. 2137684. W.C. is supported by CSHOR, which is a joint research Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research between QNLM and CSIRO. J.Z. acknowledges the Swiss National Science Foundation (Ambizione grant 179876) and the Helmholtz Initiative and Networking Fund (Young Investigator Group COMPOUNDX, grant agreement VH-NG-1537). L.R.L. is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy Biological and Environmental Research Regional and Global Model Analysis programme area. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for the US Department of Energy by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE-AC05- 76RL01830. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a major facility sponsored by the US National Science Foundation under cooperative agreement no. 1852977. L.T.‘s contribution to this material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 2022874. H.G. is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China–Shandong Joint Fund (U1906215). We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme, which coordinated and promoted CMIP5 through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, and we thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model outputs.

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