ClimateHQ: Hot or Not?: Ocean Temperatures

Showing posts with label Ocean Temperatures. Show all posts

Changes in ocean heat content, with depth, from 1960 to 2018

Changes in the ocean heat content, or heat budget, from 1960 to 2018, at various depths in the ocean. From Science Advances journal. Keep in mind that about 90% of all CO2 warming is absorbed by ocean water, rather than atmospheric gases, so changes should be more evident in ocean water:

Ocean heat content at different depths since the 1950s

Ocean heat content at varying depths since the 1950s. Note the pronounced warming since the late 1990s:

From Balmaseda, et al., 2013, Geophysical Research Letters.

Ocean heat content through 2012

Measured in the upper 2000m of the ocean:

Combined land/sea surface temperatures since the late 1800s

Land and sea surface temperatures since the late 1800s. Data, from 1880 on, is broken down into high, low, and southern latitudes:

Source: NASA GISS data set

Ocean heat content since WWII

Oceans are known to have taken up much of the excess heat generated by increased CO2 over the past century. But how much? Here is data taken from seven different sources, beginning in the early 1940s:

Sea Surface Temperatures in Australia

Annual sea surface temperatures in Australia from 1910 to 2010. Red line represents yearly data, while the gray columns are a 10-year running average.

El Nino Effects on Global Temperatures

El Nino events bring warm ocean water to the surface off the west coast of South America, and this has been linked to periodic increases in sea-surface and lower-tropopause temperatures. Here are recent ENSO (El Nino) events graphed along with satellite tropopause temperature data:

The following trend emerges if you remove the ENSO effects from the UAH satellite data:

Other researchers play around with statistics to show that ENSO is responsible for all the recent warming. In this recent graph, you can see the effects of mid-latitude El Ninos and cold La Ninas about every 7 years: