Dataset Information

Atmospheric wavenumber-4 driven South Pacific marine heat waves and marine cool spells.

ABSTRACT: Marine heat waves (MHW) and cool spells (MCS) can both positively and negatively impact marine ecosystems with potentially large societal and economic impacts. Here, I examine the global teleconnections of MHW/MCS in the southern hemisphere and Tasman Sea. When MHW/MCS are defined with respect to a linear warming trend, there is little evidence that MHW in the Tasman Sea are changing in either frequency or intensity but may be lasting longer. MCS may be becoming weaker and less frequent. I show that MHW/MCS in the Tasman Sea co-occur with corresponding events in the Atlantic, Indian, and eastern-Pacific Oceans, and these southern hemisphere events are likely driven by stalling of a global wavenumber-4 (W4) atmospheric wave, leading to anomalously weak north-easterly winds during MHW or strong south-westerly winds during MCS. Thus, the key to predicting MHW/MCS is in understanding what causes the atmospheric W4 wave to stall.

SUBMITTER: Chiswell SM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8346471 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Atmospheric wavenumber-4 driven South Pacific marine heat waves and marine cool spells.

Chiswell Stephen M SM

Nature communications 20210806 1

Marine heat waves (MHW) and cool spells (MCS) can both positively and negatively impact marine ecosystems with potentially large societal and economic impacts. Here, I examine the global teleconnections of MHW/MCS in the southern hemisphere and Tasman Sea. When MHW/MCS are defined with respect to a linear warming trend, there is little evidence that MHW in the Tasman Sea are changing in either frequency or intensity but may be lasting longer. MCS may be becoming weaker and less frequent. I show ...[more]

PMID: 34362924

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Project description:With marine heat waves increasing in intensity and frequency due to climate change, it is important to understand how thermal disturbances will alter coral reef ecosystems since stony corals are highly susceptible to mortality from thermally-induced, mass bleaching events. In Moorea, French Polynesia, we evaluated the response and fate of coral following a major thermal stress event in 2019 that caused a substantial amount of branching coral (predominantly Pocillopora) to bleach and die. We investigated whether Pocillopora colonies that occurred within territorial gardens protected by the farmerfish Stegastes nigricans were less susceptible to or survived bleaching better than Pocillopora on adjacent, undefended substrate. Bleaching prevalence (proportion of the sampled colonies affected) and severity (proportion of a colony's tissue that bleached), which were quantified for >1,100 colonies shortly after they bleached, did not differ between colonies within or outside of defended gardens. By contrast, the fates of 399 focal colonies followed for one year revealed that a bleached coral within a garden was a third less likely to suffer complete colony death and about twice as likely to recover to its pre-bleaching cover of living tissue compared to Pocillopora outside of a farmerfish garden. Our findings indicate that while residing in a farmerfish garden may not reduce the bleaching susceptibility of a coral to thermal stress, it does help buffer a bleached coral against severe outcomes. This oasis effect of farmerfish gardens, where survival and recovery of thermally-damaged corals are enhanced, is another mechanism that helps explain why large Pocillopora colonies are disproportionately more abundant in farmerfish territories than elsewhere in the lagoons of Moorea, despite gardens being relatively uncommon. As such, some farmerfishes may have an increasingly important role in maintaining the resilience of branching corals as the frequency and intensity of marine heat waves continue to increase.

Dataset Information

Atmospheric wavenumber-4 driven South Pacific marine heat waves and marine cool spells.

Publications

Atmospheric wavenumber-4 driven South Pacific marine heat waves and marine cool spells.

Similar Datasets

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