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Author Topic: Oceans Getting Hotter  (Read 1135 times)

sky otter

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Oceans Getting Hotter
« on: October 06, 2014, 03:31:34 pm »



http://www.climatecentral.org/oceans

Oceans Getting Hotter Than Anybody Realized

Published: October 5th, 2014
By John Upton

The RV Kaharoa motored out of Wellington, New Zealand on Saturday, loaded with more than 100 scientific instruments, each eventually destined for a watery grave. Crewmembers will spend the next two months dropping the 50-pound devices, called Argo floats, into the seas between New Zealand and Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. There, the instruments will sink and drift, then measure temperature, salinity and pressure as they resurface to beam the data to a satellite. The battery-powered floats will repeat that process every 10 days — until they conk out, after four years or more, and become ocean junk.

Under an international program begun in 2000, and that started producing useful global data in 2005, the world’s warming and acidifying seas have been invisibly filled with thousands of these bobbing instruments. They are gathering and transmitting data that’s providing scientists with the clearest-ever pictures of the hitherto-unfathomed extent of ocean warming. About 90 percent of global warming is ending up not on land, but in the oceans.




Research published Sunday concluded that the upper 2,300 feet of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans may have warmed twice as quickly after 1970 than had previously been thought. Gathering reliable ocean data in the Southern Hemisphere has historically been a challenge, given its remoteness and its relative paucity of commercial shipping, which helps gather ocean data. Argo floats and satellites are now helping to plug Austral ocean data gaps, and improving the accuracy of Northern Hemisphere measurements and estimates.

“The Argo data is really critical,” said Paul Durack, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher who led the new study, which was published in Climate Nature Change. “The estimates that we had up until now have been pretty systematically underestimating the likely changes.”

Durack and Lawrence Livermore colleagues worked with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist to compare ocean observations with ocean models. They concluded that the upper levels of the planet’s oceans — those of the northern and southern hemispheres combined — had been warming during several decades prior to 2005 at rates that were 24 to 58 percent faster than had previously been realized.


That rapid ocean warming has consequences for the Earth’s climate and its shorelines.

“We continue to be stunned at how rapidly the ocean is warming,” said Sarah Gille, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor. Gille was not involved with this paper, nor was she involved with a similar one published Sunday that examined the role of ocean warming in rising sea levels. She described both of them as “tremendously interesting” studies.

“Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today, we'd still have an ocean that is warmer than the ocean of 1950, and that heat commits us to a warmer climate,” Gille said. “Extra heat means extra sea level rise, since warmer water is less dense, so a warmer ocean expands.”

Ocean warming is exacerbating flooding caused by the melting of glaciers and other ice. Seas have risen 8 inches since the industrial revolution, and they continue to rise at a hastening pace, worsening floods and boosting storm surges near shorelines around the world. Another 2 to 7 feet of sea level rise is forecast this century, jeoparizing the homes and neighborhoods of the 5 million Americans who live less than 4 feet above high tide, as well as those of the hundreds of millions living along coastlines in other countries.

The other ocean temperature study, also published Sunday in Climate Nature Change, used Argo and other data to tentatively conclude that all of the ocean warming from 2005 to 2013 had occurred above depths of 6,500 feet. During the same period, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists who wrote the paper concluded, the expansion of those warming waters caused a third of the planet’s 2.8 millimeters of annual sea-level rise.

Sunday’s papers joined more than 1,000 others published so far that have used Argo float data to improve science’s understanding of waterways that are climatically influential but difficult to measure manually. “This research covers a very broad range of topics including ocean circulation, water mass formation and spreading, mesoscale eddies, interannual variability such as El Niño, decadal variability, and multi-decadal climate change,” said Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor Dean Roemmich, who was in New Zealand last week preparing Argo floats for deployment by the RV Kaharoa’s crew. “The program has revolutionized large-scale physical oceanography.”

Steve Rintoul, a researcher at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, said findings of ocean warming above 6,500 feet in the Jet Propulsion Lab’s study explain the recent slowdown in warming at the Earth’s surface, which is sometimes called global warming hiatus, or warming pause.

“An important result of this paper is the demonstration that the oceans have continued to warm over the past decade, at a rate consistent with estimates of Earth’s net energy imbalance,” Rintoul said. “While the rate of increase in surface air temperatures slowed in the last 10 to 15 years, the heat stored by the planet, which is heavily dominated by the oceans, has steadily increased as greenhouse gases have continued to rise.”

That extra heat isn’t expected to swim with the fishes forever. Some of it will eventually rise from the deep, raising temperatures in places that more directly affect us landlubbers.

Just how rapidly the oceanic heat will resurface to warm the land is “something that we struggle with,” said Scripps’s Gille. But she said heat is constantly shifting between oceans and the atmosphere. “A warmer ocean will mean a warmer atmosphere.”

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sky otter

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Re: Oceans Getting Hotter
« Reply #1 on: October 08, 2014, 08:00:18 pm »

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/08/sea-level-rise_n_5951472.html


Coastal Cities Are Drowning, Thanks To New Reality Of Sea Level Rise
 


 Climate Central    | By John Upton 
 

 Posted:  10/08/2014 9:08 am EDT    Updated:  10/08/2014 2:59 pm EDT


This story originally appeared on Climate Central.

Coastal American cities are sinking into saturated new realities, new analysis has confirmed. Sea level rise has given a boost to high tides, which are regularly overtopping streets, floorboards and other low-lying areas that had long existed in relatively dehydrated harmony with nearby waterfronts. The trend is projected to worsen sharply in the coming years.

A new report, released by the Union of Concerned Scientists late on Tuesday, forecasts that by 2030, at least 180 floods will strike during high tides every year in Annapolis, Md. In some cases, such flooding will occur twice in a single day, since tides come in and out about two times daily. By 2045, that’s also expected be the case in Washington, D.C., Atlantic City, N.J. and 14 other East Coast and Gulf Coast locations out of 52 analyzed by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“The shock for us was that tidal flooding could become the new normal in the next 15 years; we didn’t think it would be so soon,” said Melanie Fitzpatrick, one of three researchers at the nonprofit who analyzed tide gauge data and sea level projections, producing soused prognoses for scores of coastal Americans. “If you live on a coast and haven’t seen coastal flooding yet, just give it a few years. You will.”

The group originally set out to study increased risks of storm surges and hurricanes as seas rose, but quickly changed tack.

“We realized before we even got through the statistics of the last 40 years that tidal flooding is a much bigger story,” Fitzpatrick said. “But nobody’s really telling that story.”

The following interactive could help you assess the future flooding risks in your city.



map at link..sorry won't move
  :(


The researchers used intermediate-to-high sea level rise projections from the recent National Climate Assessment to guide their predictions for future coastal flooding rates. Those projections included a rise in sea levels of five inches between 2012 and 2030, and a rise of nearly a foot between 2012 and 2045. To help consider the effects of local conditions, such as the sinking lands of the mid-Atlantic coast, the group used data compiled by Climate Central’s team of scientists.

The 52 locations, from Portland, ME, to Freeport, Texas, were selected because the National Weather Service issues flood advisories based on local tide gauge recordings there. That allowed the researchers to confidently use the tide gauge data to calculate historical flooding rates, and compare those with projected future rates.

In the absence of flood-deflecting marshes, seawalls or levees, two-thirds of the 52 communities studied can expect a tripling in the frequency of high-tide flooding during the next 15 years, the researchers concluded. Half of the communities studied are expected to be flooded more than two dozen times every year by 2030.

The research was published as the double decker effects of rising seas and king tides spectacularly flood Floridian shorelines. Without the 8 inches of sea level rise recorded since pre-industrial times — one of the hallmarks of climate change — those king tides would not have the same flooding effects.

The projections were published four months after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released an analysis of the recent rise of tidal floods, which it calls nuisance floods. That analysis revealed that nuisance floods were occurring now in some places nearly ten times more often than had been the case in the 1960s.

“Impacts from sea level rise are real and now,” said NOAA oceanographer William Sweet, one of the authors of the agency’s June report. “They’re best viewed in terms of an increase of nuisance flood frequencies. These frequencies have risen dramatically over the last several decades, especially along the East Coast and parts of the Gulf Coast.”

Sweet advised the Union of Concerned Scientists team on how to use NOAA’s tide gauge data. He is working with NOAA colleagues to publish their own projections for the future rise in nuisance flood rates. He said the agency’s findings, which he expects to be published in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of this year, would be “similar” to the those published this week by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Sweet said NOAA is producing the forecasts to provide communities with “environmental intelligence” to help them plan for the fast-growing hazards associated with sea level rise.

The new report provides examples of some of ways in which hard-hit communities are already adapting to rising seas, such as work to raise roads in New York City’s Jamaica Bay. In Annapolis, along the vulnerable Chesapeake Bay coastline, a partnership between the Navy and local authorities has produced what Fitzpatrick called “the most forward thinking” approach to adapting to rising seas, partly because the floods are being viewed as a national security threat.

"Communities need to be talking to each other," Fitzpatrick said. "There's enough happening up and down the coast that communities can learn from places, like Miami and Atlantic City, that are dealing with flooding on a regular basis."
 
 



 

 



 

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Offline The Matrix Traveller

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Re: Oceans Getting Hotter
« Reply #2 on: October 09, 2014, 02:55:59 am »
The Earths 'Thermal Cycle' accounts for probably most of the  increase in Ocean temperature.

Check out 'Ground Temperature changes', throughout history ....  :)

If I am right, you should find a similar scenario in 'ground temperature readings' at different depths.

Near the surface it fluctuates, but at greater depths their may be less fluctuations ?

 


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