Sources of uncertainties in 21st century projections of marine ecosystem drivers

Abstract:

Marine ecosystems are increasingly stressed by human-induced climate change affecting their physical and biogeochemical environment. At present, future projections of marine ecosystem drivers are inherently uncertain, complicating assessments of climate change impacts. Here we evaluate the relative importance of specific sources of uncertainties in projections of marine ecosystem drivers (warming, acidification, nutrient availability and declining oxygen levels) as a function of prediction lead-time and spatial scales. We show that the uncertainty in century-scale global and regional surface pH projections is dominated by scenario uncertainty, highlighting the critical importance of policy decisions on carbon emissions. In contrast, uncertainty in century-scale sea surface temperature projections in polar regions, oxygen levels in low oxygen waters, and regional nutrient availability is dominated by model uncertainty, underscoring that overcoming deficiencies in scientific understanding and improved process representation in Earth system models are critical for making more robust predictions. For smaller spatial and temporal scales, uncertainty associated with internal variability also constitutes an important source of uncertainty, suggesting irreducible uncertainty inherent in these projections. We also show that changes in the combined multiple ecosystem drivers emerges from the noise in 44% of the ocean in the next decade and in 57% of the ocean by the end of the century following a high carbon emissions scenario. Changes in pH and sea surface temperature can be reduced substantially and rapidly with aggressive carbon emissions mitigation, but only marginally for oxygen and net primary productivity. The broader scientific implications, including downscaling of Earth system model output for large marine ecosystem regions and for impact assessment models, will also be discussed.