Characterisation of Marine Heatwaves off Western Australia by Sina Pinter

Join us for a lunchtime seminar presenting landmark findings on Western Australian marine heatwaves.

With marine heatwaves becoming more frequent and intense, predicting these extreme ocean temperatures is critical to protecting our marine ecosystems. This seminar showcases outcomes from a major, UN-endorsed project managed by the Western Australian Marine Science Institution (WAMSI), bringing together 26 cross-disciplinary scientists from Australia's leading research and government bodies to improve how we forecast and respond to extreme marine heatwaves.

Event Details:

• Date: Wednesday 28 October

• Time: 12pm – 12:45pm AWST (30 min presentation, 15 min Q&A)

• Location: Auditorium, IOMRC Building, UWA Crawley Campus

• Presenter: Sina Pinter (UWA PhD Candidate)

• Format: In-person and online via Teams. Sessions will be recorded.

Seminar Title:

Characterisation of Marine Heatwaves off Western Australia

Seminar Description:

Marine heatwaves (MHWs) are extreme, prolonged warm-water events that pose escalating threats to marine ecosystems, fisheries, and coastal livelihoods worldwide.

The Western Australian (WA) coast has experienced severe surface MHWs over the past three decades. However, research has predominantly relied on satellite-derived sea surface temperatures, leaving subsurface expressions poorly understood. In addition, standard detection methods require long climatological baselines that in-situ subsurface records rarely meet. This thesis addresses these gaps by adopting a subsurface, four-dimensional (longitude, latitude, depth, and time) perspective on WA MHWs, developing new tools for detecting them from short records, and applying both to characterise the most extreme event on record.

About Sina:

Sina Pinter is a PhD candidate in Physical Oceanography at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on marine heatwaves off the coast of Western Australia, combining long-term ocean observation data, satellite observations and ocean and climate reanalysis data to understand how these extreme events develop, persist and affect the coastal ocean.