The ocean stores huge amounts of heat and carbon in a vast reservoir that covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface. Measuring changes in that heat content over time has been a subject of intense scientific research, with analyses growing more precise as observing systems expand and the duration of measurements grow.
In an article published in Nature Climate Change, John Lyman, a scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research and Gregory Johnson, a NOAA scientist at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, analyzed four prominent ocean temperature datasets and found that throughout the past 52 years, the area of ocean regions showing long-term warming trends dwarfs that of regions showing cooling trends.
For 15 years, Johnson and Lyman have led an analysis of ocean temperatures for the annual “State of the Climate” report published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
“Ocean warming is tightly linked to increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases concentrations, so global ocean temperature trends are an important yardstick for measuring climate change,” said Johnson. “We noticed that as the time-series of upper ocean heat content we were analyzing grew over the years, more of the ocean area was covered by a statistically significant warming trend.”
Read more at University of Hawaii
Image: Recovering a rosette water sampler. (Photo credit: NOAA)