Global oceans suffer extreme heatwaves intensifying since the early 21st century: A new comprehensive index

Abstract

As a result of global warming, major ocean basins have witnessed an increase in the number of extreme warm events and a decrease in the number of extreme cold events, increasing the number of marine heatwave (MHW) events. Previous quantification of MHW events has been limited to simple single metrics, which can only recognize some characteristics from a particular aspect. Here, we propose a new marine Heat Wave Comprehensive Index (HWCI) by fusing multiple metrics to characterize the scalable cumulative intensity of MHWs, which exhibits excellent identification reliability and superiority to effectively monitor the evolutionary patterns of various levels of MHW events. We find that five levels of global MHW events have presented an obvious spatial expansion and temporal enhancement pattern since the early 21st century, with the obvious spatial contraction (32.98 %) of weak events followed by the expansion (19.82 %) of extreme events at the highest growth rate of 0.07, primarily in the mid–low-latitude oceans and the Arctic. The results demonstrate that extreme MHW events dominate global MHW evolution patterns and that the expansion and intensification of such episodes have major implications for the event distribution and level structure. The new indicator is promising for directly measuring and identifying MHWs, and contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the evolution of MHWs in the context of global climate change.