Climate change impacts on sea surface temperature in the Gulf of Oman, using change factor method

Climate change and its impacts on our environmental systems recently have become a major concern for human beings. It has been proven that even minor changes in nature’s equilibrium may lead to perturbations in a larger scale, which may affect the entire ecosystem of humans, animals, and plants. The oceans, in particular, play a major role in climate system, and its parameters must be carefully observed. One of these parameters is the sea surface temperature (SST), which represents the regulation of heat transfer between the atmosphere and the oceans; thus it has great importance. The purpose of this study is to assess the climate change impacts on SST over five points located in the Gulf of Oman. Since GCM/RCM models regularly have systematic errors, a bias correction method, Change Factor (CF) has been applied to model outputs. In this regard, ERA5 SST reanalysis dataset with monthly temporal and 0.25 degree spatial resolution has been taken as reference data in the historical period (1985-2005) and HadGEM2-AO model has been chosen for the future projections (2070-2090) under three emission scenarios, namely RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5. An increase in SST of about 3°C, 2°C and 1°C is projected in RCP 8.5, RCP 4.5, and RCP 2.6, respectively over the Gulf of Oman in the future period

Keywords:

climate change , sea surface temperature , change factor method , Gulf of Oman