General and Local Characteristics of Current Marine Heatwave in the Red Sea

Abstract

In the ocean, heat waves are vital climatic extremes that can destroy the ecosystem together with ensuing socioeconomic consequences. Marine heat waves (MHW) recently attracted public interest, as well as scientific researchers, which motivates us to analyze the current heat wave events over the Red Sea and its surrounding sea region (Gulf of Aden). First, a comprehensive evaluation of how the extreme Red Sea surface temperature has been changing is presented using 0.25° daily gridded optimum interpolation sea surface temperature (OISST, V2.1) data from 1982 to 2020. Second, an analysis of the MHW’s general behavior using four different metrics over the study area, together with a study of the role of climate variability in MHW characteristics, is presented. Finally, the main spatiotemporal characteristics of MHWs were analyzed based on three different metrics to describe MHW’s local features. Over the studied 39 years, the current results showed that the threshold of warm extreme sea surface temperature events (90th percentile) is 30.03 °C, providing an additional average thermal restriction to MHW threshold values (this value is changed from one grid to another). The current analysis discovered 28 separate MHW events over the Red+, extending from 1988 to 2020, with the four longest events being chosen as a study case for future investigation. For the effect of climate variability, our results during the chosen study cases prove that ENSO and ISMI do not play a significant role in controlling MHW characteristics (except the MHW intensity, which has a clear relation with ENSO/ISMI) on Red+. Moreover, the chlorophyll concentration decreases more significantly than its climatic values during MHW events, showing the importance of the MHW effect on biological Red Sea features. In general, the MHW intensity and duration exhibit a meridional gradient, which increases from north to south over the Red Sea, unlike the MHW frequency, which decreases meridionally.