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Oceanography

Where's the heat?

Nature Climate Change volume 4, pages 956–957 (2014)Cite this article

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In recent decades, over nine-tenths of Earth's top-of-the-atmosphere energy imbalance has been stored in the ocean, which is rising as it warms. Combining satellite sea-level data with ocean mass data or model results allows insights into ocean warming.

One could say that global warming is ocean warming. Quantifying how fast, and where, the ocean is warming is vital to understanding how much and how fast the atmosphere will warm, and seas will rise1,2,3,4. Historically, sparse and sometimes uncertain in situ ocean temperature data have made that quantification challenging5. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Paul Durack and colleagues6 argue that previously published 0–700 m ocean warming rates based on in situ ocean temperature data are underestimated in the more sparsely sampled Southern Hemisphere, at least from 1970 until the advent of the Argo array of profiling floats7 in the early 2000s. They reach this conclusion by analysing the in situ data together with satellite sea-level data and climate model results. Another study8 published in Nature Climate Change concludes that the deeper half of the ocean (below 2 km depth) has, on average, not warmed from 2005 to 2013. William Llovel et al.8 arrive at this result by combining satellite sea-level and ocean-mass-change data with unprecedentedly dense and high-quality Argo in situ temperature data from the upper half of the ocean volume (to depths of 2 km).

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Figure 1: Deep Argo float deployment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Building 3, Seattle, 98115, Washington, USA

    Gregory C. Johnson & John M. Lyman

  2. University of Hawaii Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, 1000 Pope Road, Marine Science Building, Honolulu, 96822, Hawaii, USA

    John M. Lyman

Authors
  1. Gregory C. Johnson
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  2. John M. Lyman
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Correspondence to Gregory C. Johnson or John M. Lyman.

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Johnson, G., Lyman, J. Where's the heat?. Nature Clim Change 4, 956–957 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2409

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