Research
Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Marine Heatwaves in the Indonesian Seas
How often, how long and how intensely do marine heatwaves occur across the Indonesian Seas, and how are those events distributed in space and time?
The Indonesian Seas sit at the meeting point of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, where strong tidal mixing, complex bathymetry and monsoon-driven currents shape sea surface temperatures. This strand establishes the observed baseline for the project: where marine heatwaves occur, how often they form, how long they persist, how intense they become and how far they spread.
Marine heatwaves are identified from satellite-derived sea surface temperature using a percentile-based definition, then examined across seasons, sub-regions and years. The resulting climatology separates recurring patterns from exceptional events and provides the event set used in the analyses that follow.
Rather than treating the region as one uniform box, the analysis resolves the marginal seas, straits and open-water areas that make up the Indonesian Seas, so that differences in exposure and duration are not averaged away.