Recent Variations In Upper Ocean Heat Content – Information From Phil Klotzbach
By Dr. Roger Pielke Senior
Phil Klotzbach has graciously permitted me to post an update on upper ocean heat content in the equatorial upper ocean. He writes
“The Climate Prediction Center recently released its equatorial upper ocean heat content for April 2010. One of the primary areas that they focus on is the equatorial heat content averaged over the area from 180-100W. The decrease in upper ocean heat content from March to April was 1C, which is the largest decrease in equatorial upper ocean heat content in this area since the CPC began keeping records of this in 1979. The upwelling phase of a Kelvin wave was likely somewhat responsible for this significant cooling. It seems like just about every statistical and dynamical model is calling for ENSO to dissipate over the next month or two as well, so it’s probable that we will see a transition to neutral conditions shortly. I have attached a spreadsheet showing upper ocean heat content data from CPC since 1979. In case you’re interested, the correlation between April upper ocean heat content from 180-100W and August-October Nino 3.4 is an impressive 0.75 over the years from 1979-2009.
He has plotted the data below. An interesting question is to where this heat has gone.
It could have moved north and south in the upper ocean, however, to the extent the sea surface temperature anomalies map to the upper ocean heat content, there is no evidence of large heat transfers except, perhaps, in the tropical Atlantic [see].
The heat could have been transferred deeper into the ocean. However, if this is true, this heat would have been seen moving to lower levels, but, so far, there is no evidence of such a large vertical heat transfer.
The heat could, of course, be lost to space. This appears to be the most likely explanation.
Stephen Brown,
From one avid gardener to another – I feel your pain! I’m on the Olympic Peninsula of WA in Sunny Sequim. We are known for our mild, ocean-tempered climate. Normally I can count on our last frost being around April 15 (if not earlier). I’ve awakened to a thick frost here several nights lately, including the last two. Daytime temps have been below normal as well. Thankfully, I’ve procrastinated this year and not planted my vegetable gardens yet. But the poor bees are hungry and really suffering through this cold spring. I’ve resorted to putting out melon rinds and honey on the patio, trying to give them a little sustenance. Where’s the heat??? Not here.
Must be time for another heat wave during the winter in the antarctic
A misleading headline – what he actually says is that the upper ocean heat content of the tropical part of the Eastern Pacific has dropped by 1C.
Said Pat Frank:
May 7, 2010 at 12:16 pm
I remain a little confused about how heat can be, “transferred deeper into the ocean.” Warmer waters are typically less dense waters, and will rise toward the surface. So, what’s the mechanism for transferring heat against the buoyancy gradient?
*
*
Have you ever heard of an ‘inversion layer?’
It happens in the oceans all the time, just as it happens in the atmosphere.
R. Gates: You quoted the post, “The heat could have been transferred deeper into the ocean. However, if this is true, this heat would have been seen moving to lower levels, but, so far, there is no evidence of such a large vertical heat transfer,” and wrote: “There are currently no instruments to measure this movement to the deeper ocean, so to say there is no evidence misses the true condition which is– we don’t know. With such a large upwelling phase of the Kelvin wave, you also have to have a downwelling as well.”
In the tropical Pacific, the topic of this post, the greatest variations in OHC takes place in the top 300 meters. This has been measured via the TAO Project since 1979, I believe. There are also XBT in the area and have been for even more decades. Since earlier this decade, there are now ARGO floats bobbing around the tropical Pacific, sensing to 2000 meters. They’d know if ocean heat was being subducted in the tropical Pacific. The vast majority of the subduction taking place is in the high latitudes of the North Atlantic and in the Southern Ocean.
You wrote, “No instruments yet to measure this, but Trenberth et. al. are working on that.”
Please cite your source for this statement.
You quoted from the post, “The heat could, of course, be lost to space. This appears to be the most likely explanation,” and commented, “Why is this most likely?….”
I believe the “lost to space” is poorly worded and that he meant “released to the atmosphere”.
Aargh says:
May 7, 2010 at 3:08: Response: I’m afraid this poster hasn’t a clue about what mother nature is doing. This happened MINUTES from Calgary. The male is over 200lbs. and devoured a dear of equal weight in a couple of hours. The ecosystem has to be doing pretty well to support this many carnivors of that size. Even the landowner had no idea how much danger this represents to his family. Priddis area has a substantial human population and supports wild horses as well. What planet is Aargh living on? pmhttp://www.calgarysun.com/news/alberta/2010/04/29/13765476.html
is it under the bed?
is it under the rug?
is it under the dog?
is it under the car?
is it under the house?
is it under the lake?
is it under the rain forest?
is it under the land fill?
Oh where oh where can that lost heat be??
Maybe it wsn’t here in the first place??
Naaaaahhhhhh. They couldn’t be that dumb, could they???
I also think that the heat did indeed not go anywhere! It never got there in the first place. It did not come as usual from the sun because there must have been an increase in clouds and cloud formations. How else do you explain the increase in precipitation everywhere (in the world)? See also my earlier post May 7 12h48.
The ‘missing heat’ is here in Broome, West Australia, and we are keeping it. We live here because we hate the cold. In the last 12 months only October was a lower than mean minimum, and only August and January had a lower than mean maximum. The April 2010 minimum was 3.3C above average. Our usual monsoon activity for the summer was almost non existent, possibly pushed by stronger Westerlies, sending moisture from evaporation eastward, allowing yachting to take place at Lake Eyre.
Where has all that water vapour gone?
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Earth/action?opt=-p&img=vapour.bmp
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Earth/action?opt=-p&img=cloudy.bmp
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Earth/action?opt=-p&img=wx-cmap.bmp
On 2nd thought, though keeping with my assertion that the heat never got here in the first place, it seems more likely to me now that it might be related to volcanic activity.
That is why it is great to make summaries of studies. They make you re-think. Apart from the Iceland event there was also something major going on in the pacific. I think I saw pictures of that here on WUWT. So, my explanation is:
1) the heat never got here, 2) this must have resulted from an increase in earth’s albedo, 3) this was most likely caused by increased volcanic activities
Lets see, I live on the West coast. The fruit trees in my area were two weeks late to set blossoms. My uncle lives on the East coast, he and all the neighbors lost their tomato plants to frost during a recent cold snap.
I am not prepared to say it has been unusually cold in the context of the past couple of hundred years, but it has certainly been cold in the context of the past 15 to 20 years.
Would an increase in the trade winds have an effect on upper OHC?
stephen richards says:
May 7, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Gates
Just because your ‘its a travesty’ high priest says that hot water goes down it doesn’t mean that the water will defy the laws of physics in favour of your religion. The oceans have very distinct layers of water at very different temp much like the atmosphere where mixing between layers is miniscule.
_____________
I think some might find the following basic concepts in ocean heat transport of interest. First, a simple diagram of how heat can (an does) go down into cooler layers of water below. Take a look at this downwelling diagram:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Downwelling2.jpg
Essentially, it takes energy to drive warmer water against the gravity/salinity gradients, just like it would take energy for you to hold a toy balloon under water. The energy from your muscles, which came from your food, which came ultimately from the sun must hold that balloon under water. So too with warm water to be driven down (when it wants to rise) needs energy to do so, and in the diagram above, that energy comes from wind, and wind has its primary roots of course in solar energy reaching the earth.
But also, take a look at this nice simple general overview of how ocean circulation patterns work:
http://earth.usc.edu/~stott/Catalina/Oceans.html
Warm water is being tranported both horizontally and vertically throughout the oceans of the world…and despite the fact that we do have bouys to tell us the basic surface temps of the ocean, we really don’t know how much heat is being forced into the deeper ocean because we don’t have any large number of bouys for the deeper ocean. I know is quite popular on this site and other to make fun of Kevin Trenberth for his “missing heat” issue, but the deeper ocean may indeed be part of the answer for where it is going, as it most certainly is not being lost to space:
http://www2.ucar.edu/news/missing-heat-may-affect-future-climate-change
Meanwhile, arctic sea ice extent is now well below both 2008 and 2009’s levels:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Healthy amounts of melting still going on in the Barents Sea, and the Greenland and Bering Sea now also showing some nice melt. We also continue to see a larger amount of ice passing south through the Fram Strait than we saw just a few weeks ago. Here’s a nice photo of that:
http://ice-map.appspot.com/
Just go to the page above and position your cursor at about 79 degrees N, by 4 degrees W, zoom in and look at all that lovely ice headed south for the summer…
Bob Tisdale says:
May 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm
R. Gates…you wrote, (regarding heat going to the deeper ocean) “No instruments yet to measure this, but Trenberth et. al. are working on that.”
Please cite your source for this statement.
From the article at this NCAR/UCAR site:
http://www2.ucar.edu/news/missing-heat-may-affect-future-climate-change
“Trenberth and Fasullo call for additional ocean sensors, along with more systematic data analysis and new approaches to calibrating satellite instruments, to help resolve the mystery. The Argo profiling floats that researchers began deploying in 2000 to measure ocean temperatures, for example, are separated by about 185 miles (300 kilometers) and take readings only about once every 10 days from a depth of about 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) up to the surface. Plans are underway to have a subset of these floats go to greater depths.”
—————–
Bottom line: we know far less about heat tranport in the deeper ocean than we do in the atmosphere. I would suggest that some who are open minded enough really go back and check out the full article at the link above, and do some independent research on Kevin Trenberth and find out what his “it’s a travesty” statement was really all about when talking about the missing heat. He gives his accounting of it here:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
I know it’s lots of fun to make fun of Kevin Trenberth, but along the way, its also maybe healthy to really understand what he really said and the context in which it was said.
It is amazing how global warming proponents continue to say heat is hidden somewhere in the earth. They just will not say the earth is cooling. I imagine we could have 12 months of winter and they’ll tell us the karma of hidden heat is going to get us. It’s the monster hiding under our beds even though we looked under the bed and saw it’s not there.
The child still thinks it’s down there.
Average Wind Speed for Honolulu
Dec ’09 – 5.7
Jan ’10 – 6.9
Feb ’10 – 8.0
Mar ’10 – 13.2
Apr ’10 – 11.7
R. Gates – There is a new paper out which tracks the deep, deep ocean heat content:
– below 1000M in the important Antarctic Bottom Water regions – the source of the deepest ocean waters;
– below 4000M in the rest of the world’s oceans.
The study finds that only 0.1 watts/m2 is going into these areas so Trenberth’s missing energy is still missing and is most likely not there at all.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/Recent_AABW_Warming_v1.pdf
—-
There was another study out recently which tracked the speed of the deep ocean currents around Antarctica and over the sunken continent, the Kerguelen Plateau, which found the currents are much faster than expected which means the deep ocean mixes / transfers energy at a faster rate than expected. It might only take the deep oceans 100 to 200 years to catch up to the surface temperatures (rather than more than 1000 years as was being bandied around lately).
With faster deep ocean mixing, no heat accumulation in the upper 700M of the ocean recently, and only 0.1 watts/m2 going ito the deep ocean areas, it seems that the lags in the climate system have to be rewritten from the IPCC’s 30 years (and Hansen’s 1500 years) to most of the impact occuring in the first 30 days, first year or up to 7 years (with a very, very small amount occurring over the next hundred years). There will be no lag for ice-sheet melt if there is no long lags in the rest of the system.
R. Gates,
You have answered posts in a most selective manner, concentrating on those that attempt to dispute (erroneously) that heat cannot be subducted into the deep oceans. You have selectively avoided responding to those more inconvenient questions. DavidmHoffer has summed up my own questions perfectly, so I will quote him here:
“Now can you explain what physical process it is that imparts so much momentum in warm water that:
1) it descends to depths of the oceans that we can’t measure
2) it does so in such a narrow column that it passes between all the argo buoys doing ocean temperature measurement all over the world completely undetected
3) it does so without causing any disturbance noticed in surface behaviour
4) the cold water that it supposedly displaces, even temporarily, does not show up anywhere on the surface nor does it pass by the argo buoys on the way up
5) How does this momentum overwhelm the natural downwelling processes of cold water sinking that we can in fact observe, and why is it that we can oberve them but not your warm downward currents?”
Please answer David’s questions if you can.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
May 7, 2010 at 11:34 pm
It is amazing how global warming proponents continue to say heat is hidden somewhere in the earth. They just will not say the earth is cooling.
What would make them think it is cooling?
R. Gates
The Argo profiling floats that researchers began deploying in 2000 to measure ocean temperatures, for example, are separated by about 185 miles (300 kilometers) and take readings only about once every 10 days from a depth of about 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) up to the surface. Plans are underway to have a subset of these floats go to greater depths.”
Bottom line: we know far less about heat tranport in the deeper ocean than we do in the atmosphere>>
Yup. So you are proposing large amounts of heat getting from the upper ocean layers to the lower, and skipping by the argo network undetected. 185 mile resolution isn’t enough…. how far apart are those surface stations we use for analysis? But let’s put all that aside for a moment.
How does the AGW longwave get into the ocean in the first place? The theory is that upward bound longwave gets absorbed by CO2 and re-emitted, some of it coming back down. OK, how does it get into the ocean? Because on the way down, having been emitted from 400 ppm of CO2 it runs into an increasing concentration of water vapour. By the time you get to the ocean surface the LW is trying to bypass 40,000 ppm of water vapour. You can argue that CO2 has a stronger absorption spectrum than water vapour, but so what? Its still 400 ppm versus 40,000 PLUS there’s CO2 mixed in with the water vapour as well. So how much LW could get through to the ocean surface?
And for what little could get through what happens to it? It penetrates a whole millimeter or so. What happens then? It could heat the water below it I suppose, and probably does to a certain extent, but mostly itz going back up into the atmosphere via evaporation. You could argue if you want that conductance from the atmosphere to the ocean could heat up the ocean, and it would, a little. But with the ocean mass being 1400 times that of the atmosphere you would need an AWFUL hot atmosphere to warm the ocean even a little, and most of that would be visible as a general UPPER ocean warming which we know isn’t happening, itz cooling.
You also made a number of remarks about arctic warming, less ice, etc. If you want to construe that as a sign of warming you also have to take into account the gigantic negative feedback that this represents. As the ice cover retreats the amount of upward LW that gets released rises exponentially with temperature, and in an area where water vapour and ozone are at a minimum as GHG effects. So small temperature rises in the arctic are huge cooling mechanisms for the planet.
In a sense, weather is what’s happening now, today, tomorrow, and the next day or two. Near Term Climate (NTC) is what’s coming soon or seasonal. Mid Term Climate (MTC) is what’s around the corner and down the street or annual. Long Term Climate (LTC) is what’s in the works or generational.
Where did the additional or missing this or that go? Look for variation in the Global Ocean Conveyor or Thermohaline Circulation. Key in on the North Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Eastern Pacific.
http://oceanmotion.org/html/background/ocean-conveyor-belt.htm
Is there anyone here who agrees with me that the missing heat probably never got here because of an increase in earth albedo?refer to my post May 7 12:48 pm.
either that can be due to an increase in clouds and cloud formation (global cooling starting: we in Johannesburg South Africa had 218% rain so far this year) and /or it could be related to volcanic eruptions. Hopefully it is more the latter. I am not sure what we are going to do if one day we find out here on WUWT that winter is not going to end (for a lot of people).
“R. Gates says:
[…]
I know it’s lots of fun to make fun of Kevin Trenberth, but along the way, its also maybe healthy to really understand what he really said and the context in which it was said.”
For me, his “travesty” comment expressed a certain desperation about the uncertainty around the findings of his own science – an uncertainty that they (the “climate professionals” or “climate change scientists” as they are called by our visitors from the AGW side) don’t allow themselves to express publicly. What happens when this hipocrisy breaks down you see in the case of Phil Jones: visibly aged, under medication, suicidal thoughts. So they are in a kind of “clinging on to the dogma” state even though they know it’s all flaky evidence.
This is my honest analysis. It would be the healthiest thing to do for them to publicly admit their own doubts, but as we know, they don’t dare to.
Even biologist James “Gaia” Lovelock came to the same conclusion in a recent Guardian interview, in my opinion the first time in his live he got something right.
davidmhoffer said:
“and most of that would be visible as a general UPPER ocean warming which we know isn’t happening, itz cooling…”
———
Upper oceans are cooling? You must be talking about some very regionalized short term phenomenon, yes? Certainly we know that over the longer term, quite the opposite is true:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
The ENSO cycle, which is cycling back to neutral or possibly a weak La Nina later this year is superimposed on the longer term increase in ocean heat content as shown in the data and graph. This is no difference, in fact, quite the same, as the longer term increase in temperature over the last several decaded being superimposed on the solar cycles, as shown in this graph:
http://www.climate4you.com/Sun.htm#Global temperature and sunspot number
Talking about the “oceans cooling” because of the end of El Nino cycle, is a lot like talking about snow in Florida because of a negative AO index. These are all short term cyclical events, and of course, the whole issue of AGW is whether or not the warming we’ve seen is due to some longer term cycle (longer than any normal ENSO, PDO, solar etc cycle). I currently am of the opinion that the anthropogenic signal is there once all the other known cycles are accounted for.
davidmhoffer also said:
“As the ice cover retreats the amount of upward LW that gets released rises exponentially with temperature, and in an area where water vapour and ozone are at a minimum as GHG effects. So small temperature rises in the arctic are huge cooling mechanisms for the planet.”
———
Please site your sources for this counter-intuitive statement– especially the last sentence.
REPLY: Please learn to spell “cite” before admonishing others. -A