Autor/es reacciones

Carlos García-Soto

Researcher at the CSIC (IEO), responsible for the Ocean-Climate System Assessment Unit and collaborator in international United Nations processes on climate change and oceans, including the Climate Change COPs

The report makes an important contribution by quantifying the extent to which human-induced climate change is intensifying extreme sea surface temperatures in different European regions. The overall signal is clear, but the uncertainty lies not so much in the direction of change as in its regional magnitude. In several of the areas analyzed, especially in the Mediterranean, observations show much more intense trends than those simulated by the report's models. The authors themselves acknowledge this divergence and point out that some of their combined estimates may be underrepresenting the actual change.

When observations and models diverge so significantly, in-situ data and regional knowledge cease to be merely complementary and become integral to the interpretation. Future assessments could be strengthened by more directly incorporating monitoring data and accumulated oceanographic expertise from the studied regions themselves, particularly in the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean. Such programs can help to better understand why certain areas are responding more rapidly than models predict and to connect large-scale trends with locally observed processes and impacts.

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