Longer and more frequent marine heatwaves over the past century

By E. Oliver, Markus G. Donat, M. Burrows, Pippa J. Moore, Dan A. Smale, L. Alexander, J. Benthuysen, M. Feng, A. Sen Gupta, A. Hobday and 5 more. Nature Communications, 2018

1,777 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Heatwaves are important climatic extremes in atmospheric and oceanic systems that can have devastating and long-term impacts on ecosystems, with subsequent socioeconomic consequences. Recent prominent marine heatwaves have attracted considerable scientific and public interest. Despite this, a comprehensive assessment of how these ocean temperature extremes have been changing globally is missing. Using a range of ocean temperature data including global records of daily satellite observations, daily in situ measurements and gridded monthly in situ-based data sets, we identify significant increases in marine heatwaves over the past century. We find that from 1925 to 2016, global average marine heatwave frequency and duration increased by 34% and 17%, respectively, resulting in a 54% increase in annual marine heatwave days globally. Importantly, these trends can largely be explained by increases in mean ocean temperatures, suggesting that we can expect further increases in marine heatwave days under continued global warming. Marine heatwaves are climatic extremes with devastating and long-term impacts on marine ecosystems, fisheries and aquaculture. Here the authors use a range of ocean temperature observations to identify significant increases in marine heatwaves over the past century.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f16d954d8ff3c65729b27c3c22884ee91cfb0ef

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Citations in the corpus

Marine Heatwave, Harmful Algae Blooms and an Extensive Fish Kill Event During 2013 in South Australia (2019, background): “From 1925 to 2016, global average marine heatwave frequency and duration has increased by 34 and 17%, respectively (Oliver et al., 2018).”
Predicting cetacean abundance and distribution in a changing climate (2018, background): “…study shows promise for predicting changes in abundance and distribution of mobile marine predators during anomalously warm ocean conditions that are likely to become more common as the climate changes (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007; Oliver et al., 2018; Rosenzweig et al., 2008).”
The unprecedented coupled ocean-atmosphere summer heatwave in the New Zealand region 2017/18: drivers, mechanisms and impacts (2019, background): “Only recently have MHWs been assessed (Oliver et al 2018) and very few studies have examined coupled ocean-atmosphere heatwaves, one such example being that of Olita et al (2007) of the Mediterranean in 2003.”