DCFP research highlights areas of intense warming and the strongest ocean currents are heating up

DCFP Project Leader Richard Matear has contributed to research that has found that the world’s strongest ocean currents; which play key roles in fisheries and ocean ecosystems, will experience more intense marine heatwaves than the global average over coming decades. This research was detailed in a paper published by researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the University of Tasmania and CSIRO.

The work was led by Hakese Hayashida, and was undertaken with Peter Strutton, and Xuebin Zhang.

“We know marine heatwaves are on the rise globally, but policymakers, fisheries experts, aquaculture industries and ecologists need to know how this will play out at regional levels, especially in terms of where they will occur and how much hotter they will be,” said lead author from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes Dr Hakase Hayashida, when speaking with Alvin Stone from CLEX.

“Our detailed modelling is the first step in peeling back these layers, revealing the temperature variation that occurs across these currents and around them, indicating where the sharpest rises in marine heatwaves are likely to occur”.

The paper was published by Nature Communications in August 2020 and has been featured on the Climate Extremes (ARC Centre of Excellence) site, as well as in the Cosmos Magazine .

Article Details: Hayashida, H., Matear, R.J., Strutton, P.G. and Zhang, X. (2020b), Insights into projected changes in marine heatwaves from a high-resolution ocean circulation model, Nature Communications, 1–21. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18241-x .