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Ocean science

Hiatus heat in the Indian Ocean

Nature Geoscience volume 8, pages 423–424 (2015)Cite this article

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Global surface warming has slowed since the start of the twenty-first century, while Pacific heat uptake was enhanced. Analyses of ocean heat content suggest that the warm water was transferred to the Indian Ocean, through the Indonesian straits.

Global mean surface air temperatures have increased steadily since the 1950s. A large part of this warming is attributed to the release of greenhouse gases as a result of human activities1. The induced energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere2 amounts to about 1 W m−2. Nevertheless, globally averaged surface air temperature has been almost stable over the past decade3. Enhanced heat uptake in the tropical Pacific through natural climate variability has been suggested as an explanation for most of this slow-down in warming4,5. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Lee and colleagues6 track down the excess heat that initially entered the Pacific Ocean in the tropical Indian Ocean, following transfer through the Indonesian Passages.

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Figure 1: Deep atmospheric convection over the Indo–Pacific warm pool drives the Walker circulation.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jérôme Vialard is at LOCEAN/IPSL Sorbonne Universités, UPMC, Univ Paris 06-CNRS-IRD-MNHN, Case 100, 4, Place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France,

    Jérôme Vialard

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  1. Jérôme Vialard
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Correspondence to Jérôme Vialard.

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Vialard, J. Hiatus heat in the Indian Ocean. Nature Geosci 8, 423–424 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2442

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