Presenter: Tobias Friedrich (University of Hawaii)

Description:
The characteristics of regional climate-change effects on marine environments are determined by a superposition of large-scale anthropogenic trends and natural variability. Most current global climate models, however, lack the resolution to capture the full spatial and temporal range of natural variability. To address this, we nest a regional, high-resolution physical/biogeochemical ocean model of the Hawaiian Island chain within CMIP6 projections to downscale the impacts of climate change to the submesoscale for the 21st century. This approach will result in a better representation of the natural variability of physical and biogeochemical processes in the dynamically rich region of Hawai‘i. We present the technical details and challenges of the downscaling process and discuss preliminary results of our submesoscale future climate projections.