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- Title
Insights into projected changes in marine heatwaves from a high-resolution ocean circulation model.
- Authors
Hayashida, Hakase; Matear, Richard J.; Strutton, Peter G.; Zhang, Xuebin
- Abstract
Global climate models project the intensification of marine heatwaves in coming decades due to global warming. However, the spatial resolution of these models is inadequate to resolve mesoscale processes that dominate variability in boundary current regions where societal and economic impacts of marine heatwaves are substantial. Here we compare the historical and projected changes in marine heatwaves in a 0.1° ocean model with 23 coarser-resolution climate models. Western boundary currents are the regions where the models disagree the most with observations and among themselves in simulating marine heatwaves of the past and the future. The lack of eddy-driven variability in the coarse-resolution models results in less intense marine heatwaves over the historical period and greater intensification in the coming decades. Although the projected changes agree well at the global scale, the greater spatial details around western boundary currents provided by the high-resolution model may be valuable for effective adaptation planning. Marine heatwaves are likely to intensify in a warmer world, but prediction of these events is hampered by course-scale modeling. Here the authors develop a fine scale, global model which shows that marine heatwaves will amplify with greater spatial variability, particularly at western boundary regions.
- Subjects
MARINE heatwaves; CIRCULATION models; OCEAN circulation; GLOBAL warming; ATMOSPHERIC models; FORECASTING
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2020, Vol 11, Issue 1, pN.PAG
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-020-18241-x