Journal article
Robustness and uncertainties in global multivariate wind-wave climate projections
Joao Morim, Mark Hemer, Xiaolan L Wang, Nick Cartwright, Claire Trenham, Alvaro Semedos, Ian Young, Lucy Bricheno, Paula Camus, Merce Casas-Prat, Li Erikson, Lorenzo Mentaschi, Nobuhito Mori, Tomoya Shimura, Ben Timmermans, Ole Aarnes, Oyvind Breivik, Arno Behrens, Mikhail Dobrynin, Melisa Menendez Show all
NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP | Published : 2019
Abstract
Understanding climate-driven impacts on the multivariate global wind-wave climate is paramount to effective offshore/coastal climate adaptation planning. However, the use of single-method ensembles and variations arising from different methodologies has resulted in unquantified uncertainty amongst existing global wave climate projections. Here, assessing the first coherent, community-driven, multi-method ensemble of global wave climate projections, we demonstrate widespread ocean regions with robust changes in annual mean significant wave height and mean wave period of 5–15% and shifts in mean wave direction of 5–15°, under a high-emission scenario. Approximately 50% of the world’s coastline..
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Awarded by Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program of the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Awarded by Research Council of Norway through the ExWaMar project
Funding Acknowledgements
This study represents Task 3 of the second phase of COWCLIP (https://cowclip.org/), an international collaborative working group endorsed by the Joint Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology, a partnership between the World Meteorological Organization) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. We acknowledge the different climate-modelling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison and the World Climate Research Program's Working Group on Coupled Modelling. We acknowledge ECMWF for availability of ERAI data, and Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System for altimeter wind/wave data, used for model validation. J.M., M.H. and C.T. acknowledge the support of the Australian Government National Environmental Science Program Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub. B.T. and M.W. acknowledge the support of the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program of the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, through contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center of the LBNL. I.Y. acknowledges ongoing support from the Australian Research Council through grant No. DP160100738, and to the Integrated Marine Observing System. N.M., T.S., A.B. and B.K. acknowledge the support of the TOUGOU Program by MEXT, Japan, JSPS-Kakenhi Program. L.E. acknowledges the support of the US Geological Survey Coastal and Marine Hazards/Resources Program. O.B. and O.A. acknowledge the support of the Research Council of Norway through the ExWaMar project through grant No. 256466. We thank all contributors to the COWCLIP project, including C. Appendini (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico), F. Ardhuin (Ifremer, France), N. Groll (Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht Zentrum, Germany), S. Gallagher (Met Eireann, Ireland), S. Gulev (Moscow State University, Russia) and W. Perrie (Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Canada).