Downscaled projections of Sea Surface Temperatures and Degree Heating Weeks in the wider Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico

Projections of the onset of annual coral bleaching conditions in the Caribbean under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 are produced using an ensemble of 33 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase-5 models via dynamical downscaling. A high-resolution (~11 km) regional ocean model (MOM4.1) is used for the dynamical downscaling. From the downscaled Sea Surface Temperature (SST) projections, an ensemble was created by replacing the mean of the 2006-2011 modeled temperature with the mean of the Pathfinder v5.0 climatology. An ensemble was made by removing the quadratic trend and annual cycle of the mean-corrected MOM4.1 all remaining monthly anomalies were randomized 33 times and the annual cycle was added back. Degree Heating Weeks (DHW) are calculated. Full methods are described in the peer reviewed article: van Hooidonk, R., Maynard, J. A., Liu, Y., & Lee, S.-K. (2015). Downscaled projections of Caribbean coral bleaching that can inform conservation planning. Global Change Biology, 1–13. http://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12901