Assessing marine heat waves in the Mediterranean Sea: a comparison of fixed and moving baseline methods

Frontiers in Marine Science

Marine Science

Ananda Pascual¹  Pere Rosselló¹  Vincent Combes² 

[1] Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avancats, IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB), Esporles, Spain;Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avancats, IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB), Esporles, Spain;Departament de Física, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Palma de Mallorca, Spain;

关键词: Mediterranean Sea;    extreme event;    marine heat wave;    sea surface temperature;    baseline period;    CMIP6;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fmars.2023.1168368

 received in 2023-02-17, accepted in 2023-05-30,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The study of marine heat waves as extreme temperature events has a wide range of applications, from a gauge for ecological and socioeconomic impact to a climate change indicator. Various definitions of marine heat waves as extreme sea temperature events exist to account for its broad applicability, with statistical definitions based on percentile based thresholds being widespread in its use. Using satellite and model data of the Mediterranean Sea, we analyze the statistical implications of choosing baseline climatological periods for threshold delineation, which are either fixed in the past or shifted in time. We show that in the context of a warming Mediterranean Sea, using a fixed baseline leads to a saturation of marine heat wave days that compromises the significance of this marine indicator, with 90% of climate models analyzed predicting an average above 189 marine heat wave days per year by 2050 even for the lowest emission scenario. We argue that only with a moving baseline, can we reach a definition for marine heat waves which yield consistently rare extreme events.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Rosselló, Pascual and Combes