Author: Quinn    Carey

Major: Marine Sciences

Graduation Year: 2018

Thesis Advisor: Andrew Thomas

Description of Publication: Global climate change linked to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere is resulting in the increase of ocean temperatures. Increasing ocean temperatures impacts both the timing and strength of ocean stratification and circulation, as well as changes in species distribution, fisheries and other industries. The major objectives of this research are to quantify the observed and predicted sea surface temperature (SST) changes in the four large marine ecosystems (LMEs) that run along the eastern seaboard of North America from Florida to Labrador: the Southeast US shelf, Northeast US shelf, the Scotian shelf, and the Newfoundland Labrador shelf. We use SST output from 26 different international global climate models in the Community Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) to view and map SST trends over the 125 year period in the study area from 1976 to the end of the 21st century. The relative performances of these 26 different global models on the shelf are then examined by comparing and contrasting the model SSTs to NOAA’s daily Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST) satellite data over the 35 year time period of their overlap (1982-2016). All 26 models show strongly increasing SSTs over the remainder of this century with regionally varying strengths. The relative performance of the 26 models, compared to the satellite data in the overlap period, also varies between the four LMEs.

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