Marine Heatwaves (MHWs) are extreme climatic events that impact all ocean basins and can persist from weeks to months and spread over hundreds to thousands of kilometers. MHWs have devastating impacts on marine habitats and ecosystems and influence regional weather systems such as the monsoons and extreme weather events like tropical cyclones. Climate change is clearly responsible for increasing the frequency of the widespread occurence of MHWs, but open questions remain about the internal variability that drives these extreme events above the slowly evolving background warming. To this end, ICTP-CLIVAR Summer School on ‘Marine Heatwaves: Global Phenomena with Regional Impacts’ will be jointly organized by CLIVAR and ICTP in July 2023 at Trieste, Italy. The Summer School aims to enhance the understanding of the mechanisms, predictability and impacts of MHWs, as well as to provide hand-on experience and tools to enhance the capacity of early career scientists (ECS) from under-resourced countries for detecting and predicting MHWs. The summer school generates pan-CLIVAR interest with cross-panel representation on the organizing committee.
The summer school will be organized over a 6-day period as primarily an in-person event. Should Covid-related safety considerations limit some participants to travel to Trieste, plans will be made to enable their participation virtually. The ICTP facility is well set-up to host virtual meetings including equipment and IT support. The school will include not only lectures on the current state of knowledge on the topic of MHWs, but also practical sessions with the development of student projects to provide a hands-on approach to the understanding of the material presented in the lectures. In particular, analysis tools for the detection and diagnosis of these extreme events in observations and climate model output will be made available to the students prior to the school, so that they can be readily applied to small research projects during their time in Trieste. We also plan to have short presentations given by the students to share their research and give them an opportunity to be able to organize and share their science findings with all other participants.
