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KLIMAFORSK-Stort program klima

Downscaling Climate and Ocean Change to Services: Thresholds and Opportunities

Awarded: NOK 2.8 mill.

In order to better prepare the society for adaptation to the increasing influences of climate change, a credible knowledge on climate change impact on regional scale is required. CE2COAST aims to deliver state, trends, and variability of pressures on ocean services resulting from ocean and coastal climate and biogeochemical change in the Europe and other key regions. CE2COAST will adopt a suite of regional high-resolution downscaling models to provide this information. At NORCE, there are two important questions to address in the project: (i) when and where do anthropogenic climate change in the ocean emerge and potentially disturb the natural ecosystem and (ii) what are the added values of regional models as compared to state-of-the-art Earth system models, which are still regularly used to determine climate change impact on local society. We have evaluated a suite of 17 IPCC-class Earth system models to identify the locations and timings of the anthropogenic signals emerging in the world ocean for temperature, salinity, oxygen, and pH. We found that anthropogenic-induced changes for these variables will likely emerge first in the ocean interior. The earliest signal emergence will be in ventilation regions such as the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. In addition, the tropical Atlantic are also identified as an early hot spot. The main reason for this is because the interior ocean has a relatively stable environment and that propagation of anthropogenic signals will exceed the natural variability much earlier than that on the surface ocean. Our finding highlights the importance of better understanding the environmental changes in the ocean interior, where most of the marine ecosystem resides. We have also started to assess the added value of high-resolution regional models as compared to global models. For marine heat waves, which is an important climate change indicator affecting the ecosystem (e.g., coral reefs), our downscaled model in the Caribbean Sea reveals that global models simulate substantial biases in the frequency and duration of marine heat waves. In addition to higher resolution, improvements in physical parameterization in global models are critical to resolve the regional and local scale dynamical features. Our study underlines that care should be taken when applying global model projections to assess regional climate change impact on the ocean ecosystem.

Global change will have significant impacts at regional and coastal scales on marine systems, dependent socioeconomic systems, ocean services and can strongly interact with regional pressures. CE2COAST delivers transnational added value through strategically combining national expertise across oceanography, marine biogeochemistry and ecology, data and database management, earth system, marine and ecosystem modelling and science policy communication. The primary novelty of will be an observation-driven synthesis of downscaling methodology to provide better process resolution and system representations that are tailored to regional/coastal domains and their associated pressures/services. It will compile and analyze new targeted, fit-for-purpose marine observations datasets from existing and new project observations of ocean climate, biogeochemistry and relevant ecological indicators. We will deliver Earth System Model simulations from the CMIP archive that will be downscaled for hindcasting and projecting physical and biogeochemical fields in the regional and coastal ocean providing past/future states and climate change signals. A capacity to understand and predict these impacts on regional seas and coasts is essential for developing robust strategies for adaptation and mitigation. To inform adaptation policy to ocean and coastal change, we will deliver key new knowledge to end-users through dissemination activities. We will integrate stakeholder clusters in project-long decision making for co-production of relevant science products for specific scientific, management, regulatory, industrial and ocean service applicable assessments to deliver an integrated European evaluation of marine health. It will contribute knowledge crucial to reducing economic, scientific and social disparity across Europe. We will encourage knowledge transfer through common goals with a focus on JPI Climate and Oceans, IPCC, UN SDGs, MSP, CFP, MSFD, WFD and the Arctic Council.

Publications from Cristin

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Funding scheme:

KLIMAFORSK-Stort program klima