Oceans warmers, smaller than previously thought
May 24th, 2010A new paper in the journal Nature titled Robust warming of the global upper ocean concludes that the world’s oceans have been warming more than previously thought – and more than even climate models were suggesting.
RealClimate has posted this graph showing the measured warming as compared to previous and model estimates:
Basically, if the total flux of energy entering the Earth’s atmosphere is greater than energy losses, then has to go somewhere – and that somewhere is mainly the ocean. Other reservoirs for this excess energy, like the land surface or melting ice, are much smaller and are for most purposes negligible.
An article about the study by Jason Socrates Bardi quotes Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado (Trenberth was not involved with the study):
Ninety percent of the energy [trapped by increased greenhouse gases] goes into the ocean. It’s important to track this in order to properly understand what is happening in the climate system. If you dump heat in the ocean and it gets moved around and reappears somewhere, it has consequences in terms of the weather patterns.
Another new study in the journal Oceanography titled The Volume of Earth’s Ocean finds the Earth’s ocean is smaller than the most recent published estimates, by a volume equivalent to 500 times the Great Lakes or five times the Gulf of Mexico. The study’s authors used satellite altimetry data to better measure ocean depth and thus to more accurately estimate the ocean’s volume.
