Summertime bottom marine heatwaves in the East China Sea driven by oceanic circulation

Jiaxiang GAO; Rong-Hua ZHANG; Hai ZHI

doi:10.1007/s00343-025-4218-x

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Summertime bottom marine heatwaves in the East China Sea driven by oceanic circulation

Physics | Updated：2025-12-16

- Summertime bottom marine heatwaves in the East China Sea driven by oceanic circulation
- Journal of Oceanology and Limnology Vol. 43, Issue 6, Pages: 1726-1738(2025)
- Affiliations：
  
  1.Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment Monitoring and Pollution Control, Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
  2.School of Marine Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
  3.School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
- Author bio：
  
  rzhang@nuist.edu.cn
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1007/s00343-025-4218-x
  CLC：
- Received：14 August 2024，
  
  Online First：14 January 2025，
  
  Published：01 November 2025
- Accepted：
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GAO Jiaxiang,ZHANG Rong-Hua,ZHI Hai.Summertime bottom marine heatwaves in the East China Sea driven by oceanic circulation[J].Journal of Oceanology and Limnology,2025,43(06):1726-1738.
DOI：

GAO Jiaxiang,ZHANG Rong-Hua,ZHI Hai.Summertime bottom marine heatwaves in the East China Sea driven by oceanic circulation[J].Journal of Oceanology and Limnology,2025,43(06):1726-1738. DOI： 10.1007/s00343-025-4218-x.

摘要

Abstract

Bottom marine heatwaves (BMHWs)

i.e.

anomalous ocean warming at the seafloor

can happen without concurrent surface marine heatwaves (SMHWs)

which pose a serious threat to marine ecosystems and present a challenge to detect and study them adequately. This type of event is called independent BMHWs. This study examines the summertime BMHWs on the continental shelf of the East China Sea (ECS) using oceanic reanalysis data from 1993 to 2020. Our results show that summertime BMHWs in the ECS are generally more intense than SMHWs

with some BMHW events occurring without surface expression. Through heat budget analyses of the 2016 SMHW event and the 2019 BMHW event

we investigated the drivers of independent summertime BMHWs. It is indicated that the occurrences of bottom temperature anomalies in summer are predominantly attributed to oceanic horizontal advection. Specifically

the summertime BMHWs on the central ECS shelf are closely related to the strengthening of the inshore branch of the Taiwan Warm Current (TWC) and the weakening of the offshore TWC branch. These findings provide important insights into the underlying physical processes and diagnostic tools for monitoring and managing independent BMHWs in the ECS.

关键词

Keywords

references

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