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Marine heatwaves in a changing climate

Heatwaves in the ocean can rapidly disrupt marine ecosystems and the economies that depend on them. A global analysis of these events casts light on their causes and sets the stage for revealing how they might change in the future.
  1. Michael G. Jacox

    1. Michael G. Jacox is in the Environmental Research Division, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Monterey, California 93940, USA. He is also at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado, and at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California.

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Heatwaves that occur over land are well known for having adverse impacts on human health, infrastructure and agriculture. Less attention has been paid to analogous episodes in the ocean, dubbed marine heatwaves (MHWs), but interest in these transient events is growing as their potentially dramatic ecological and economic impacts1 have become clear. This enhanced awareness of the importance of MHWs has fostered a desire to understand their causes and whether they can be predicted. Writing in Nature Communications, Holbrook et al.2 present the first comprehensive analysis of MHWs across the globe. They identify specific drivers of these events, as well as associations between MHWs and known climate oscillations.

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Nature 571, 485-487 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02196-1

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