A New Model for Isolating the Marine Heatwave Changes under Warming Scenarios

Marine heatwaves (MHWs) exert devastating impacts on ecosystems. Understanding their responses to anthropogenic forcing has attracted rapidly growing scientific interest. Given the disparate adaptation capacity and mobility among marine species, it is crucial to disentangle changes of MHWs related to the rising mean temperature from those to the changing temperature variability. It has been suggested that the latter's effects could be isolated by replacing a fixed baseline with a moving one for calculating the climatological mean and percentile metrics in MHW analysis. In this study, the effects of a moving baseline on MHW statistics (annual MHW days and cumulative intensity) changes in a warming climate are systematically evaluated based on simulations from simple stochastic climate models and a set of coupled general circulation models in the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble project. On the one hand, a moving baseline does not necessarily remove the influences of rising mean temperature on MHW changes and will artificially cause negative trends in MHW statistics when the ocean exhibits an accelerated warming rate as in the RCP8.5 scenario. On the other hand, it always underestimates the effects of changing temperature variability on MHW changes. We propose a new model that adopts a partial moving baseline combined with a local linear detrending to isolate MHW changes caused by changing temperature variability. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: A new model is proposed to isolate marine heatwave changes caused by changing temperature variability from those by rising mean temperature under greenhouse warming.

Automated summary

This study systematically evaluates the effects of a moving baseline on marine heatwave statistics in a warming climate. It finds that a moving baseline does not necessarily remove the influences of rising mean temperature on marine heatwave changes and underestimates the effects of changing temperature variability.