From CSIRO – Warming in the Tasman Sea a global warming hot spot
Oceanographers have identified a series of ocean hotspots around the world generated by strengthening wind systems that have driven oceanic currents, including the East Australian Current, polewards beyond their known boundaries.
The hotspots have formed alongside ocean currents that wash the east coast of the major continents and their warming proceeds at a rate far exceeding the average rate of ocean surface warming, according to an international science team whose work is published in the journal Nature Climate Change today.
Paper co-author, CSIRO’s Dr Wenju Cai, said that while the finding has local ecological implications in the region surrounding the hotspots, the major influence is upon the ocean’s ability to take up heat and carbon from the atmosphere.
In Australia’s case, scientists report intensifying east-west winds at high latitudes (45º-55ºS) pushing southward and speeding up the gyre or swirl of currents circulating in the South Pacific, extending from South America to the Australian coast. The resulting changes in ocean circulation patterns have pushed the East Australian Current around 350 kilometres further south, with temperatures east of Tasmania as much as two degrees warmer than they were 60 years ago.
“We would expect natural change in the oceans over decades or centuries but change with such elevated sea surface temperatures in a growing number of locations and in a synchronised manner was definitely not expected,” said CSIRO’s Dr Wenju Cai.
“Detecting these changes has been hindered by limited observations but with a combination of multi-national ocean watch systems and computer simulations we have been able to reconstruct an ocean history in which warming over the past century is 2-3 times faster than the global average ocean warming rate,” says Dr Cai, a climate scientist at CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Research Flagship.
The changes are characterised by a combination of currents pushing nearer to the polar regions and intensify with systematic changes of wind over both hemispheres, attributed to increasing greenhouse gases.
Dr Cai said the increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been the major driver of the surface warming of the Earth over the 20th century. This is projected to continue.
He said the research points to the need for a long-term monitoring network of the western boundary currents. In March next year, Australian scientists plan to deploy a series of moored ocean sensors across the East Australian Current to observe change season-to-season and year-to-year.
Lead author of the paper was Dr Lixin Wu, of the Ocean University of China, with contributing authors from five countries, many of whom are members of the Pacific Ocean Panel working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation.
The research was partly funded by a grant from the Australian Climate Change Science Program supported by the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.
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The scammers must be using the ocean this month for the answer to ‘What is Global Warming?’, it’ll be acid in the oceans next month.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093947/Nasa-solves-mystery-Earths-missing-energy–going-sea-says-space-agency.html
Wind blowing over the oceans will increase evaporation with wind strength but evaporation requires heat, the old latent heat of evaporation, which will cool the water/air interface.
Sun dims in UV band as it goes sleepy.
Lower UV lets Stratosphere / Tropospheric top lower (air column gets shorter).
This causes more active polar vortex. From that we get both a ‘loopy jet stream’ in the N. Hemisphere (and our more variable weather, rather like it was in the 1950’s) and, for the S. Hemisphere, a faster Circumpolar Current from higher wind speeds.
THAT then whacks into Drake Passage and sends a cold shiver of excess water up the coast of Chile (as the ‘gap’ can only carry so much). This heads out into the center of the Pacific at the Equator as the deep blue dagger of cold we saw a year or so ago. This also pushes the hotter water back toward the pole on the other side (what they saw in their ‘model’…)
On the OTHER side of Drake Passage, the slightly faster ‘jet’ through the gap speeds up the gyre in the South Atlantic. Same effect. West coasts get cool shot, east coasts get warmer water flowing past a bit more.
Over time this moves more warm water toward the poles.
Per the poles not being where the heat leaves due to IR 4th power: At the poles, the water content of the air is much less. Two things happen. IR leaves through the water window. The added warm water is stormier on the way to there and dumps more heat at altitude via convection / condensation / precipitation. Net more heat leaves. If you look at a graph of net energy flux, all the ‘leaving’ net is done at the poles. At the Equator (and near it) is net gain.
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/outgoing-radiation-ceres_netflux_m_2011-10.jpeg
One image from the ‘movie’ here:
http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/GlobalMaps/
It is very helpful to let go of the IR theory fixation and look at the actual net flux. Looking at actual weather / thunderstorms / hurricane processes helps too…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/outgoing-vs-land-vs-water-vapor/
You see all the water action near the equator where net heat gain happens, then the stratosphere moves that air to the poles where it dumps heat as it forms a downward vortex in the cold dark winter… Along the way we get a lot of weather stuff near the surface. Then from the vortex we get all that cranky winter lenses of cold air weather as it comes back…