Varying planetary heat sink led to global-warming slowdown and acceleration
Deep-sea warming slows down global warming
Global warming seems to have paused over the past 15 years while the deep ocean takes the heat instead. The thermal capacity of the oceans far exceeds that of the atmosphere, so the oceans can store up to 90% of the heat buildup caused by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Chen and Tung used observational data to trace the pathways of recent ocean heating. They conclude that the deep Atlantic and Southern Oceans, but not the Pacific, have absorbed the excess heat that would otherwise have fueled continued warming.
Science, this issue p. 897
Abstract
A vacillating global heat sink at intermediate ocean depths is associated with different climate regimes of surface warming under anthropogenic forcing: The latter part of the 20th century saw rapid global warming as more heat stayed near the surface. In the 21st century, surface warming slowed as more heat moved into deeper oceans. In situ and reanalyzed data are used to trace the pathways of ocean heat uptake. In addition to the shallow La Niña–like patterns in the Pacific that were the previous focus, we found that the slowdown is mainly caused by heat transported to deeper layers in the Atlantic and the Southern oceans, initiated by a recurrent salinity anomaly in the subpolar North Atlantic. Cooling periods associated with the latter deeper heat-sequestration mechanism historically lasted 20 to 35 years.
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Supplementary Material
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Science
Volume 345 | Issue 6199
22 August 2014
22 August 2014
Copyright
Copyright © 2014, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 17 April 2014
Accepted: 11 July 2014
Published in print: 22 August 2014
Acknowledgments
The research of K.-K.T. is supported by NSF under AGS-1262231. X.C. is supported by Natural Science Foundation of China under 41330960 and 41176029. He thanks First Institute of Oceanography of China for its support during his visit to University of Washington. The authors are grateful to many colleagues and the anonymous reviewers who commented on the manuscript and helped improve it. The data sets used in this study are publicly available in http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds285.3/ and https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/oras4-ecmwf-ocean-reanalysis-and-derived-ocean-heat-content.
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