One of the CO2 Foundation’s goals is to help broad audiences understand how the weather they experience – especially the more extreme events – is connected to the larger-scale and longer-term climate shifts. Climate attribution is an evolving field that attempts to do just that, and Climate Central has long been on its leading edge.

Questions like these are key to attribution science: How much of any given weather event is attributable to climate change? How much more likely is it to have happened in the era of rapidly changing climate conditions? How different are current conditions from what would have been if greenhouse gas emissions weren’t forcing such significant change?

The Foundation has been honored to support research and development of Climate Central’s newest ocean-based climate attribution tools since our own very early days. The CSI: Ocean tool is now used by meteorologists across the country to share with audiences the climate drivers of the ocean-related weather they experience – with a special focus on rapidly-intensifying hurricanes that result from sharply elevated sea surface temperatures.

Hotter oceans result in wilder storms and also lead to coral bleaching and impacts on fisheries and marine ecosystems, which are significant in their own right and for how their consequences cascade. As next step in this marine work, the team wants to demonstrate how to use the output from the CSI: Ocean system to link impacts to climate change, making its data available to other scientists and inspiring them to apply their approach to other problems.

Coral bleaching will be at the center of this work. It is a visible problem with significant public concern in the U.S. and globally, and being able to specifically attribute bleaching events to climate change is expected to garner significant attention. There is a simple and well-established model relating the risk of coral bleaching to temperature, and it’s understood that climate change is forcing increased ocean temperatures. Climate Central’s contribution will be to demonstrate and visualize the footprint of climate change on the increasingly frequent and severe harm being done to coral reefs.

The team expects to be able to visualize the climate change-increased risk of coral bleaching like it shows the increased risk of extreme heat with the Climate Shift Index and higher sea surface temperature with CSI: Ocean. Dr. Andrew Pershing plans to publish a scientific paper in time for the Northern Hemisphere’s coral bleaching season, and also to lead a collaboration with at least one outside scientist who will apply this new attribution approach to their study system.

The use of this tool has the potential to help marine scientists incorporate attribution science into their work and conservationists attract widespread attention to the critical impact of human-caused ocean warming on coral ecosystems. Finally, this work could be used to support claims for damages from communities or countries with coral reefs that have experienced climate-driven bleaching.