Marine Heatwaves

Context

The Marine Heatwaves Days index is relevant for marine ecosystems and fishery. This Index is part of the Ocean temperature type of the Oceanic category of the classification. The index gives the temperature at the surface of the ocean.
The higher/lower the value, the higher/lower the temperature.

Definition

The Marine Heatwaves Days index (MHD) is defined as the count of days under marine heatwaves conditions (days). A Marine Heatwave day is a day exceeding the daily climatological 90th percentile of SST during the May to September season and a reference period.

Data Sources

The data was assembled on behalf of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) based on climate projections hosted on the C3S Climate Data Store (CDS). The Index is calculated from the ERA5 reanalysis and a set of 23 earth system models simulations that were interpolated on an identical spatial grid of 1°x1° resolution, and for each of the two emission scenarios: SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5. More information about the dataset can be found in the corresponding CDS documentation resources.

Supporting Information

Further information about this application can be found in the ECDE application User Guide and the Data and datasets underpining the ECDE. Related information also be found in other sections of the EEA site: The Index based interactive EEA report: Open ocean - Marine heatwaves (link).

Data download

The aggregated data shown on the map can be downloaded as csv files.