New paper on predicting coral bleaching from sea surface temperature

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Scientists showed more than 40 years ago that coral bleaching occurs when ocean temperatures are anomalously high. Since then, global warming has caused more frequent marine heatwaves, and as expected, coral bleaching events have been on the rise. With user-friendly web portals that use sea surface temperature (SST) measured by satellites to predict bleaching events, it almost seems like the correspondence of bleaching to heat stress is so exact that our predictive ability is near perfect. But, statistically speaking, how well does temperature predict coral bleaching ?

 

Imagine it's Sunday. You're planning a BBQ for a week from today, but the weather person on TV just forecast rain for next Sunday. How much confidence do you really have in that prediction? Turns out, that's about the confidence we can place in predicting coral bleaching from SST alone. Our new paper in PeerJ dives into these statistics and proposes some initial steps forward. The main conclusion is that we should critically evaluate our understanding of the causes of bleaching events, think beyond SST, and work together to improve our predictive ability.