Marine heatwave persistence drives phytoplankton miniaturization and productivity decline in the South China Sea

Data and code for: Persistence-driven marine heatwaves reshape primary productivity and size structure in the monsoon-dominated South China Sea This repository contains the MATLAB code and processed data supporting the analysis and figures in the manuscript (Zhao et al., 2026), submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. Overview: We investigate how marine heatwaves (MHWs) of differing persistence affect size-fractionated phytoplankton primary production (PP) in the South China Sea (SCS) over the period 1982–2021. The repository includes the MATLAB scripts used for statistical analysis, MHW phase compositing, physical forcing analysis, and figure generation. It also includes the processed .mat result files required to reproduce the manuscript's main figures. Note on Data and External Models: Raw input datasets (e.g., ESA SST CCI, NOAA OISST V2, GlobColour, CMEMS MLD, and ECMWF ERA5) are publicly available from their respective providers and are not included here due to size constraints. Furthermore, the size-fractionated PP model (Brewin et al., 2017) is excluded as its copyright remains with the original authors. For full details on data sources, system requirements, and workflow instructions, please refer to the included Zenodo_README.md file.