How to detect marine heatwaves in a fjord-like environment ? Study case of the semi-enclosed inner seas of North Patagonia

Marine heatwaves (MHWs) are described as anomalously warm temperature events over a portion of the ocean during at least five consecutive days, developing in both coastal and open-ocean environments.

MHWs have been subject to numerous studies over the last years and it has been proved that their frequency and intensity is increasing through the decades in connection with human-induced global warming. Most of the studies are focusing on open-ocean MHW events and few in coastal environments, principally due to the lack of adequate data. Indeed, the detection of MHWs requires a long-term climatology of the ocean’s surface temperature, generally made with satellite data. Nevertheless, the complexity of coastal environments makes the use of satellite data non-optimal because of insufficient temporal coverage with high resolution data and interferences with land systems.

The primary purpose of this study is to detect MHWs in a semi enclosed sea, with the study case of the Sea of Chiloé, North Chilean Patagonia. This sea is characterised by multiple fjords and channel systems, and has a cloudy and rainy climate; consequently, this kind of environment is not compatible with the use of satellite data to build the long-term climatology of the sea temperature at a high resolution required to detect the MHWs. Here, we use another way to calculate the climatology, using in situ data and interpolating them in order to have a continuous field. Indeed, the inner seas of North Patagonia have been quite well sampled across the years, with measurements realised since the 1950s, spatially scattered in all the regions at both surface and depth (including fjords and channels). To spatially interpolate these data, we used the tool DIVAnd (Data-Interpolating Variational Analysis) which allows to spatially interpolate in an optimal way discrete observations onto a regular grid, taking advantage of the information in the 4 dimensions. Doing this interpolation, we got a monthly climatology at 32 different depths, from the surface to 400m. MHWs were then detected by comparing the climatology to the local temperature in the Reloncaví Sound, in the Northern part of the Sea of Chiloé, where an anchored buoy recording the temperature of the sea surface since 2017 is present. We focused on MHWs that occurred during the last five years. Strong ones were detected during summers 2021 and 2022: two successive very intense and brief events occurred in January and February 2021, and several short successive events with increasing intensity from November 2021 to February 2022. We also realised the comparison between MHWs detected using in situ data and detected using satellite data.