Abstract
Earth system models (ESMs) provide high resolution simulations of variables such as sea surface temperature (SST) that are often used in off-line biological impact models. Coral reef modellers have used such model outputs extensively to project both regional and global changes to coral growth and bleaching frequency. We assess model skill at capturing sub-regional climatologies and patterns of historical warming. This study uses an established wavelet-based spatial comparison technique to assess the skill of the coupled model intercomparison project phase 5 models to capture spatial SST patterns in coral regions. We show that models typically have medium to high skill at capturing climatological spatial patterns of SSTs within key coral regions, with model skill typically improving at larger spatial scales (≥4°). However models have much lower skill at modelling historical warming patters and are shown to often perform no better than chance at regional scales (e.g. Southeast Asian) and worse than chance at finer scales (<8°). Our findings suggest that output from current generation ESMs is not yet suitable for making sub-regional projections of change in coral bleaching frequency and other marine processes linked to SST warming.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Barbara Casati for providing useful guidance on how to code wavelet-based spatial comparison techniques in R. We thank David Long for assistance downloading CMIP5 data. The study was funded by a NERC grant to Peter J. Mumby and Peter M. Cox, the University of Exeter, the EU FORCE project and was supported by the Joint DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme.
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Kwiatkowski, L., Halloran, P.R., Mumby, P.J. et al. What spatial scales are believable for climate model projections of sea surface temperature?. Clim Dyn 43, 1483–1496 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1967-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1967-6