Past the Precipice? Projected Coral Habitability Under Global Heating.

ABSTRACT: Coral reefs are rapidly declining due to local environmental degradation and global climate change. In particular, corals are vulnerable to ocean heating. Anomalously hot sea surface temperatures (SSTs) create conditions for severe bleaching or direct thermal death. We use SST observations and CMIP6 model SST to project thermal conditions at reef locations at a resolution of 1 km, a 16-fold improvement over prior studies, under four climate emissions scenarios. We use a novel statistical downscaling method which is significantly more skillful than the standard method, especially at near-coastal pixels where many reefs are found. For each location we present projections of thermal departure (TD, the date after which a location with steadily increasing heat exceeds a given thermal metric) fo

SUBMITTER: Kalmus P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9287014 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature