Robust warming of the global upper ocean

John M. Lyman (), Simon A. Good, Viktor V. Gouretski, Masayoshi Ishii, Gregory C. Johnson, Matthew D. Palmer, Doug M. Smith and Josh K. Willis
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John M. Lyman: Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA
Simon A. Good: Met Office Hadley Centre
Viktor V. Gouretski: KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg, Grindelberg 5, 20144 Hamburg, Germany
Masayoshi Ishii: Meteorological Research Institute, 1-1 Nagamine, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0052, Japan
Gregory C. Johnson: NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, Washington 98115-6349, USA
Matthew D. Palmer: Met Office Hadley Centre
Doug M. Smith: Met Office Hadley Centre
Josh K. Willis: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91109, USA

Nature, 2010, vol. 465, issue 7296, 334-337

Abstract: Warming in the oceans The upper ocean acts as a giant heat sink and has absorbed the majority of excess energy generated by anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. This makes ocean heat content, potentially, a key indicator of climate change. But to be useful for evaluating the global energy balance and as a constraint on climate models, the measurement uncertainties of such a key indicator need to be well understood. At present the magnitude of the oceanic heat uptake is highly uncertain, with patterns of inter-annual variability in particular differing among estimates. In a major international collaboration, Lyman et al. compare the available upper-ocean heat content anomaly curves and examine the sources of uncertainly attached to them — including the difficulties in correcting bias in expendable bathythermograph data. They find that, uncertainties notwithstanding, there is clear and robust evidence for a warming trend of 0.64 watts per square metre between 1993 and 2008.

Date: 2010
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DOI: 10.1038/nature09043

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