Back to opportunities | Category Index
These are the intended use-case/justification for one or multiple variable groups. Opportunities are linked to relevant experiment groups. Identifying opportunities helps to provide a structure to map variables against requirements. Each opportunity description will convey why this combination of variables and experiments is important and how they contribute to impact.
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| description | The “Ocean Extremes” project aims to investigate and address the impacts of extreme ocean conditions such as marine heatwaves, hypoxic zones, extreme salinities, sea level extremes and storm surges, ocean acidification, and compound events. As climate change accelerates, these extreme conditions are becoming more frequent and severe, posing significant risks to marine ecosystems and coastal communities. This opportunity will collect the high-frequency multidisciplinary approach to analyze these phenomena, their causes, and their effects, ultimately contributing to better management strategies and mitigation efforts. Extreme sea levels are primarily caused by storm surges often in combination with astronomical tides, waves and/or river overflow, which requires climate-scale forcing data at the appropriate spatial and temporal scales to be combined with other resources offline. This opportunity is particularly relevant to revealing differences between eddy-permitting and coarse-resolution models. Long-term assessment of ocean extremes important for identifying vulnerable regions, designing coastal protection to appropriate levels, and assessing infrastructure and ecosystem viability. It also enables various adaptation measures to be considered and tested via sensitivity testing. In the coming decades, ocean extremes and associated floods are likely to remain a leading cause of natural disasters due to the combined effects of the increasing frequency and intensity of extremes combined with increased coastal development associated with greater exposure. |
| expected_impacts | This project will look at intense, short-lived events in the upper ocean and euphotic zones. These phenomena have direct impacts on ecosystems and coastal communities, and AR6 assessed that they are changing in frequency. These will inform studies of vulnerability, protection measures, ecosystem persistence and geographic shifts. |
| justification_of_resources | Very few levels of near surface high-frequency variables, combined with monthly climatological ocean variables, are critical for assessment of high-resolution models and ocean extremes understanding and projections. These are the same values chosen in literature studies of extremes (e.g., Gruber, N., Boyd, P.W., Frölicher, T.L. and Vogt, M., 2021. Biogeochemical extremes and compound events in the ocean. Nature, 600(7889), pp.395-407) and storm surges (Bernier, N.B., Hemer, M., Mori, N., Appendini, C.M., Breivik, O., de Camargo, R., Casas-Prat, M., Duong, T.M., Haigh, I.D., Howard, T. and Hernaman, V., 2024. Storm surges and extreme sea levels: Review, establishment of model intercomparison and coordination of surge climate projection efforts (SurgeMIP). Weather and Climate Extremes, 45, p.100689). These variables are critical to: coastal hazard assessment; understanding vulnerable regions, communities, infrastructure and ecosystems; better understand and test adaptation measures, both man-made (e.g., coastal protection structures) and natural (e.g., oyster reefs, mangroves). |
| lead_theme | Ocean & Sea-Ice |
| minimum_ensemble_size | 1 |
| name | Ocean Extremes |
| opportunity_id | 49 |
| data_request_themes | Impacts & Adaptation, Ocean & Sea-Ice, Earth System |
| experiment_groups | dcpp, scenarios_extensions, deck, fast-track, scenarios, historical |
| mips | DCPP, PMIP, DAMIP |
| time_subsets | 80ac3156-a698-11ef-914a-613c0433d878 |
| variable_groups | mixed_layer_extremes, ocean_temperature_extremes, ocean_acidification_oxygen_extremes, ocean_KE_vorticity_extremes, sea_level_extremes, surgemip_variables |