Threat by marine heatwaves to adaptive large marine ecosystems in an eddy-resolving model.

Guo, Xiuwen; Gao, Yang; Zhang, Shaoqing; Wu, Lixin; Chang, Ping; Cai, Wenju; Zscheischler, Jakob; Leung, L Ruby; Small, Justin; Danabasoglu, Gokhan; Thompson, Luanne; Gao, Huiwang (2022). Threat by marine heatwaves to adaptive large marine ecosystems in an eddy-resolving model. Nature climate change, 12(2), pp. 179-186. Nature Publishing Group 10.1038/s41558-021-01266-5

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Marine heatwaves (MHWs), episodic periods of abnormally high sea surface temperature (SST), severely affect marine ecosystems. Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs) cover ~22% of the global ocean but account for 95% of global fisheries catches. Yet how climate change affects MHWs over LMEs remains unknown, because such LMEs are confined to the coast where low-resolution climate models are known to have biases. Here, using a high-resolution Earth system model and applying a "future threshold" that considers MHWs as anomalous warming above the long-term mean warming of SSTs, we find that future intensity and annual days of MHWs over majority of the LMEs remain higher than in the present-day climate. Better resolution of ocean mesoscale eddies enables simulation of more realistic MHWs than low-resolution models. These increases in MHWs under global warming poses a serious threat to LMEs, even if resident organisms could adapt fully to the long-term mean warming.

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