Is the Earth Warming? The Ocean Gives You the Answer
Previously, the global mean surface temperature has been widely used as a key metric of global warming. However, a new study published in AGU’s Eos proposed a better way of measuring global warming: monitoring ocean heat content change and sea level rise. The authors come from a variety of international communities including China (Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences), U.S.A. (NCAR, NOAA, and University of St. Thomas) and France (Mercator Ocean).
Ocean heat content (OHC) and CO2 concentration measurements since 1950s. The black line represents ocean heating for the upper 2000 meters of ocean, and light red shading represents the 95 percent confidence interval. CO2 concentration observed in Mauna Loa Observatory is displayed by light blue.
Credit: Lijing Cheng
On the other hand, the amplitude of the global warming signal compared with natural variability (noise) defines how well a metric tracks global warming. This study shows that the temporal evolution of ocean heat content has relatively high signal-to-noise ratio; therefore, it requires 3.9 years to separate the global warming trend from natural variability. Similarly, for sea level rise, 4.6 years are sufficient to detect the climate change signal.
This study suggests that changes in ocean heat content, the dominant component of Earth’s energy imbalance, should be a fundamental metric along with sea level rise. Based on the recent improvements of ocean monitoring technologies, especially after 2005 through autonomous floats called Argo, and advanced methodologies to reconstruct the historical ocean temperature record, scientists have been able to quantify ocean heat content changes back to 1960, even though there is a much sparser historical instrument record prior to 2005. Sea level rise is best known since 1993 when altimeters were first launched on satellites to enable sea level change observations to millimeter accuracy.
According to the most up-to-date estimates, the top-10 warmest years of the ocean (indicated by OHC change at upper 2000m) are all in the most recent decade after 2006, with 2015-2016 the warmest period among the past 77 years. The heat storage in the ocean amounts to an increase of 30.4×1022 Joules (J) since 1960, equal to a heating rate of 0.33 Watts per square meter (W m-2) averaged over the entire Earth’s surface– and 0.61 W m-2 after 1992. For comparison, the increase in ocean heat content observed since 1992 in the upper 2000 meters is about 2000 times the total net generation of electricity by U.S. utility companies in 2015.
It is evident that scientists and modelers who seek global warming signals should track how much heat the ocean has stored at any given time, i.e. ocean heat content, as well as sea level rise. Locally, in the deep tropics, ocean heat content directly relates to hurricane activity. Ocean heat content is a vital sign of our planet and informs societal decisions about adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.Contacts and sources:
Zheng Lin
Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2017/09/is-earth-warming-ocean-gives-you-answer.html
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we are acually going into a mini ice age but there are other factors such a s geo engineering .we have been cooling not warming accoding to al money hungry gore the oceans should have already risen they have not. (pseudo science) we are however are going to have climate change some of the world has seen snow for the first time and others more warm er climate.