This review synthesizes recent advances in marine heatwave research, covering their three-dimensional structure, physical drivers, links with other extremes, future change, and present-day predictability. It highlights the need for stronger mechanistic understanding across the full ocean depth, improved observing systems, and models capable of representing the processes that control marine heatwaves and their impacts in a warming climate.
Whilst cruising about on
Imgur I found a post about science stuff. Not uncommon, which is nice. These sorts of grab-bag posts about nothing in particular often include some mention of climate science, almost exclusively some sort of clever visualisation of a warming planet. That seems to be what people are most interested in. I’m not complaining though, it keeps me employed. The aforementioned post caught my attention more than usual because it included a GIF, and not just a static picture of some sort of blue thing that is becoming alarmingly red (that was not meant to be a political metaphor). I’m referring to the now famous GIF by climate scientist Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) whose blog may be found
here, and the specific post in question
here. A quick bit of research on this animation revealed that it has likely been viewed by millions of people, was featured in the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics, and was created in MATLAB. Those three key points made me decide to do a post on how to re-create this exact figure in R via a bit of reverse engineering. The original GIF in question is below.