CoralBleachRisk—Global Projections of Coral Bleaching Risk in the 21st Century

Abstract

MotivationTiming, duration and severity of marine heatwaves are changing rapidly in response to anthropogenic climate change, thereby increasing the frequency of coral bleaching events. Mass coral bleaching events result from cumulative heat stress, which is commonly quantified through degree heating weeks (DHW). Here we introduce CoralBleachRisk, a daily‐resolution global dataset that characterises sea surface temperatures, heat stress anomalies and the timing, duration and magnitude of severe coral bleaching conditions from the recent past (1985) to the future (2100) under three contrasting Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Our projections are downscaled to a 0.5° resolution (~50 km), bias‐corrected and validated using remotely sensed data of sea surface temperatures and a global dataset of historical coral bleaching events. An accompanying online software tool allows non‐specialist users to access aggregated metrics of coral bleaching risk and generate time series projections of coral vulnerability for Earth's coral reefs. Our dataset enables regional to global comparisons of future trends in severe coral bleaching risk.Main Types of Variables ContainedSea surface temperature (SST), SST anomaly, DHW, annual timing and duration of Bleaching Alerts.Spatial LocationGlobal.Time Period1985–2100.Major Taxa and Level of MeasurementCoral communities.Software FormatNetcdf (.nc).