Marine Heatwaves Causal Attribution

Project A6 focuses on the analysis of spatial and temporal variability of the climate system across multiple scales. The project strongly contributes to the development of the ICON ESM, combining the numerical modelling work with advanced statistical climate attribution and model assimilation approaches. One good example of this approach is the work of A6-participating post doc researcher Armineh Barkhordarian and colleagues on the causal attribution of marine heatwaves: Over the last decade, the northeast Pacific experienced strong marine heatwaves that produced devastating marine ecological impacts and received major societal concerns. With extreme event attribution techniques, project A6 showed that greenhouse gas forcing is a necessary, but not a sufficient, causation for the multi-year persistent marine heatwave events in the current climate, such as that happened in 2019/2020 over the Pacific warm pool (Barkhordarian et al. in review).