Prolonged periods of anomalously warm or cold sea surface temperatures are tied to weather systems and may impact ecosystem functioning. Many previous studies analyzed these extreme events in detail, including their effects and drivers, but their definition remains somehow contentious because of the non-stationarity of our warming climate system, and of the uncertainties related to the choice of a reference period. In this work we propose a methodology to isolate the effects of a warming background in the detection of sea surface temperature extremes, by means of a rigorous statistical technique. We find that the contribution of global warming varies spatially, and that the role of climate variability is dominant in regions such as the tropical Pacific Ocean. As found in previous works, overall warming leads to more frequent warm and rarer cold extremes at the global scale.
Serva, F., Marullo, S., Iacono, R., Napolitano, E., de Toma, V., Landolfi, A., et al. (2025). Detection of satellite sea surface temperature extremes: Low frequency variability and climate change. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 130, e2025JC022886. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JC022886