Attributing daily ocean temperatures to anthropogenic climate change

Abstract

Ocean temperatures are rising and hit record levels around the world in 2023. While trends are clear and likely strongly connected to human-caused climate change, the oceans also exhibit variability on the daily level, leading to local extremes such as marine heatwaves. We present an operational system to estimate the impact of human-caused climate change on daily sea surface temperatures anywhere in the ocean. This system uses a multi-method approach combining observed trends and paired control/forced climate model runs from CMIP6. Our approach is novel in its flexibility and ease of application for global, daily use for any day since the beginning of the satellite era (1982–2023). The system allows for rapid evaluation for further study of attributable ocean temperatures and real-time communications of attributable ongoing events. We apply the system to well-documented heatwaves in the Tasman Sea, Gulf of Maine, and Mediterranean Sea over the past decade, as well as global conditions in July 2023, to confirm that the system produces estimates consistent with other attribution methods, and to simulate how our system handles interesting events as they are occurring. Each of these events strongly reflected impacts of climate change: their temperatures were consistently made at least four times as likely to occur in our human-influenced climate than in a world without climate change. Meanwhile, in July 2023, almost all ( >70 %) of the ocean’s temperatures were made at least twice as likely to occur on any given day. Rapid attribution of daily ocean temperatures provides a pathway for quantifying the influence of climate change on ecological impacts like coral bleaching and on ocean-generated/influenced storms like tropical cyclones.