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Atmospheric science

Increasing wind sinks heat

Nature Climate Change volume 4, pages 172–173 (2014)Cite this article

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Surface global warming has stalled since around 2000 despite increasing atmospheric CO2. A study finds that recent strengthening of Pacific trade winds has enhanced heat transport from the surface to ocean depths, explaining most of the slowed surface warming.

Despite an increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, global-mean surface temperature has been quite steady since around the turn of this century. A variety of causes have been proposed for this global warming hiatus1, which fall into two categories. First is a reduction in the top-of-atmosphere radiative imbalance, which could be a result of solar variability, stratospheric water vapour increase, an increase of airborne particles or a reduction in methane emissions to name a few. In the other category, the extra heat absorbed by the climate system is not spent warming the surface but somehow is stored elsewhere, with the ocean a likely candidate. In this issue of Nature Climate Change, Matthew England and co-workers2 report that the strengthening of Pacific trade winds during the past two decades has facilitated heat uptake by the subsurface ocean.

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Figure 1: Recent surface trends.

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  1. Yu Kosaka is at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive MC206, La Jolla, California 92093-0206, USA

    Yu Kosaka

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  1. Yu Kosaka
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Correspondence to Yu Kosaka.

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Kosaka, Y. Increasing wind sinks heat. Nature Clim Change 4, 172–173 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2138

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