Global climate-change trends detected in indicators of ocean ecology

B. B. Cael (), Kelsey Bisson, Emmanuel Boss, Stephanie Dutkiewicz and Stephanie Henson
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B. B. Cael: National Oceanography Centre
Kelsey Bisson: Oregon State University
Emmanuel Boss: University of Maine
Stephanie Dutkiewicz: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stephanie Henson: National Oceanography Centre

Nature, 2023, vol. 619, issue 7970, 551-554

Abstract: Abstract Strong natural variability has been thought to mask possible climate-change-driven trends in phytoplankton populations from Earth-observing satellites. More than 30 years of continuous data were thought to be needed to detect a trend driven by climate change1. Here we show that climate-change trends emerge more rapidly in ocean colour (remote-sensing reflectance, Rrs), because Rrs is multivariate and some wavebands have low interannual variability. We analyse a 20-year Rrs time series from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite, and find significant trends in Rrs for 40% of the global surface ocean. The climate-change signal in Rrs emerges after 20 years in similar regions covering a similar fraction of the ocean in a state-of-the-art ecosystem model2, which suggests that our observed trends indicate shifts in ocean colour—and, by extension, in surface-ocean ecosystems—that are driven by climate change. On the whole, low-latitude oceans have become greener in the past 20 years.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06321-z

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