August 24, 2023 — When heat waves began to sweep the world’s oceans in June, Alistair Hobday was not surprised. The biological oceanographer had foreseen the coming temperature spikes in forecasting models he’d helped develop. The massive pool of hot water in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, the coral-killing warmth in the Caribbean Sea, and the sweltering sea in the north Pacific Ocean had all appeared months earlier as orange and red patches on his computer screen at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The forecasts, which weren’t widely disseminated beyond fisheries managers and those in the fishing and aquaculture industry, proved to be a prescient warning of what was to come.
As the global climate continues to warm, scientists around the world have been working to develop models that predict when and where marine heat waves are likely to hit. CSIRO, an early leader, began to produce “experimental” forecasts for Australian waters in 2020. A separate forecast for all of the world’s oceans by CSIRO and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology arrived last year. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unveiled its first global marine heat wave forecast in June. And Chinese scientists are working to develop predictions for their coastal waters. “I think it won’t be more than a year before we’ve got five or six groups forecasting heat waves. This is moving really fast,” Hobday says.
Scientists hope that as the models are fine-tuned, their predictions will be robust enough to alert people 3 months in advance or more, informing decisions for fisheries, aquaculture, and marine conservation. An alarming forecast, for instance, might help a regulator decide to temporarily close fishing for a heat-sensitive species.