Poseidon Project group members presented a poster at the 2026 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The title is: Air-sea coupled drivers of the 2013–2016 North Pacific Marine Heatwave
and the abstract is:
The 2013–2016 marine heatwave (MHW) in the Northeastern Pacific (NEP) ranks among the most intense extratropical ocean warming events on record. Its complex history of growth, propagation, and decay has confounded efforts to understand the dynamics, which are crucial for monitoring and predicting future MHWs. Here, we track the MHW using a novel Lagrangian heat budget framework to quantify processes fueling its persistence. The northern component of the MHW was sustained by weakened Ekman heat transport across the North Pacific Current temperature front in combination with reduced wintertime surface heat loss. The southern component was largely driven by a suppressed California Current Ekman upwelling due to diminished alongshore winds. These anomalies were ultimately linked to a persistent low sea level pressure (SLP) over the central Pacific, which additionally enhanced poleward heat and moisture transport. Elevated sea surface temperature, in turn, reinforced this SLP anomaly, suggesting a positive SLP-MHW feedback that contributed to the event’s longevity.