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© Fotolia.com | derek-broussard | The long-term decrease in oxygen takes place primarily in deeper layers.

Improved estimates of ocean heat content from 1960 to 2015

“The ocean is the memory of all of the past climate change” Kevin Trenberth, study co-author and senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

 

  • Suggests that since 1960, a staggering 337 zetajoules of energy — that’s 337 followed by 21 zeros — has been added to the ocean in the form of heat. And most of it has occurred since 1980.
  • Provides updated ocean heat content (OHC) estimates with the goal of minimizing associated sampling error
  • Performs a subsample test, in which subsets of data during the data-rich Argo era are colocated with locations of earlier ocean observations, to quantify this error
  • Results provide a new OHC estimate with an unbiased mean sampling error and with variability on decadal and multidecadal time scales (signal) that can be reliably distinguished from sampling error (noise) with signal-to-noise ratios higher than 3
  • Finds that the inferred integrated Earth energy imbalance (EEI) is greater than that reported in previous assessments and is consistent with a reconstruction of the radiative imbalance at the top of atmosphere starting in 1985
  • Finds that changes in OHC are relatively small before about 1980; since then, OHC has increased fairly steadily and, since 1990, has increasingly involved deeper layers of the ocean
  • Finds that OHC changes in six major oceans are reliable on decadal time scales
  • Finds that all ocean basins examined have experienced significant warming since 1998, with the greatest warming in the southern oceans, the tropical/subtropical Pacific Ocean, and the tropical/subtropical Atlantic Ocean

Report “Improved estimates of ocean heat content from 1960 to 2015” | Lijing Cheng1,*, Kevin E. Trenberth2, John Fasullo2, Tim Boyer3, John Abraham4 and Jiang Zhu1

Source

CLIMATE SIGNALS 2017

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