Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I’ve been thinking about the Argo floats and the data they’ve collected. There are about 4,000 Argo floats in the ocean. Most of the time they are asleep, a thousand metres below the surface. Every 10 days they wake up and slowly rise to the surface, taking temperature measurements as they go. When they reach the surface, they radio their data back to headquarters, slip beneath the waves, sink down to a thousand metres and go back to sleep …
At this point, we have decent Argo data since about 2005. I’m using the Argo dataset 2005-2012, which has been gridded. Here, to open the bidding, are the ocean surface temperatures for the period.
Figure 1. Oceanic surface temperatures, 2005-2012. Argo data.
Dang, I like that … so what else can the Argo data show us?
Well, it can show us the changes in the average temperature down to 2000 metres. Figure 2 shows that result:
Figure 2. Average temperature, surface down to 2,000 metres depth. Temperatures are volume-weighted.
The average temperature of the top 2000 metres is six degrees C (43°F). Chilly.
We can also take a look at how much the ocean has warmed and cooled, and where. Here are the trends in the surface temperature:
Figure 3. Decadal change in ocean surface temperatures.
Once again we see the surprising stability of the system. Some areas of the ocean have warmed at 2° per decade, some have cooled at -1.5° per decade. But overall? The warming is trivially small, 0.03°C per decade.
Next, here is the corresponding map for the average temperatures down to 2,000 metres:
Figure 4. Decadal change in average temperatures 0—2000 metres. Temperatures are volume-averaged.
Note that although the amounts of the changes are smaller, the trends at the surface are geographically similar to the trends down to 2000 metres.
Figure 5 shows the global average trends in the top 2,000 metres of the ocean. I have expressed the changes in another unit, 10^22 joules, rather than in °C, to show it as variations in ocean heat content.
Figure 5. Global ocean heat content anomaly (10^22 joules). Same data as in Figure 4, expressed in different units.
The trend in this data (6.9 ± 0.6 e+22 joules per decade) agrees quite well with the trend in the Levitus OHC data, which is about 7.4 ± 0.8 e+22 joules per decade.
Anyhow, that’s the state of play so far. The top two kilometers of the ocean are warming at 0.02°C per decade … can’t say I’m worried by that. More to come, unless I get distracted by … oooh, shiny!
Regards,
w.
SAME OLD: If you disagree with something I or anyone said, please quote it exactly, so we can all be clear on exactly what you object to.
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Very cool graphics, thanks.
Ocean’s heartbeat.
Oooohh….Lots of sparkly colours and wavy shapes…..
I like!
Thanks Willis.
Oh no no no! Never ever express the ocean data in degrees or mention the world’s oceans have warmed only 0.09C over the past 55 years [Levitus et al]. The proper metric is of course Hiroshima bombs.
Paid propagandist SkS refuses to mention the 0.09C ocean warming over the past 55 years anywhere on their website or Guardian articles, instead converting it to scary and ‘sciency’ sounding Hiroshima bombs, hurricane Sandys, kitten sneezes, etc.:
Claim: Warming of 0.09°C over the past 55 years is ‘slowly but steadily cooking the world’s oceans’
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/02/claim-warming-of-009c-over-past-55.html
Nor do they ever admit per the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics, the maximum additional that 0.09C ocean warming can warm the atmosphere is 0.09C.
Ocean’s heat flush. Off the east coast of Asia and North America and in the Southern Ocean. That’s where the atmospheric heat gets sucked through Trenberthian thermal maelstroms into the deep.
Amazing Willis. The seasonal variation is huge compared to the trend. This is another data point that says that the system is very stable, yet responds quite readily to seasonal inputs, indicating a smaller time constant than I would have guessed. This means the input or response is not changing much over long periods, but does change a lot seasonally. This also means any new forcing by us is very small, or the reaction to it is very fast and balances it quickly (negative feedback). The fact that we’re only talking about a total system imbalance of around 0.5W/m^2, compared to the forcing by CO2 of almost 2W/m^2 (at 0.5 doublings) means sensitivity is quite small (or there is a huge internal variation forcing it lower).
Great visuals.
Yes, the pulse in the top animation is interesting. That reminds me of a thought from the mid 90s on the importance of ‘pulse’, during a thoughtful period.
Good post, Willis
BTW, the guy speaking Swiss German to Delaney(?) explained that it never snows in summer in Switzerland.
Max
Willis, would it be possible to do graphs like Fig. 5 for each ocean basin?
Willis, what are the margins of error in the Argo measurements?
Brilliant stuff. I agree with Michael above that there is no support for any purported lag in the ocean’s response to climate change.
Can’t get past figure 1 it’s soporific.
Thanks for the trend maps, Willis.
Its almost like the world is breathing .. soooo cool ! 🙂
The warming is trivially small, 0.03°C per decade.
Ooooh, that’s 30°c / 10,000 years. That’s massive. /sarc ;)) :))
And for an incredible 0.02 degrees C, the alarmists and goofy greens want to decarbonise the economy, which means almost universal economic misery and sky high, unreliable, energy prices.
And we still do not know if CO2 is responsible for any of this ‘runaway’ temperature increase.
Reblogged this on Tallbloke's Talkshop and commented:
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Interesting to compare the post-adjustment data Willis uses to Craig Loehle’s 2009 work which shows cooling from 2004. I wonder if the folk at Colorado.edu have one leg shorter than the other. The sea level altimetry they output has a distinct tilt too.
March 2, 2014 at 12:42 am | manacker says:
You wouldn’t believe it but we have often had snow in Australia IN SUMMER ! 😉
The margins of error must be considerable, considering the huge areas not covered by Argo: all of the Arctic ocean and most of the Southern ocean, the Hudson bay, the Baltic, part of the Bering Sea, the Caribbean, the Mexican Gulf, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Japanese Sea, the sea inside the Rykyus, all of Indonesia, the Sulu Sea, the whole Sahul shelf, the Andaman sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and sundry other shelf areas and areas off major river mouths. And a majority of these areas aren’t just shelf seas, they also contain large, deep basins. In all at least 10% of the world ocean must lack coverage.
tty you are self-parodying.
Thanks Willis – if you had a spare moment, could you rotate the globe 90 degrees to the left so we could see the UK?
For some background on the many ‘adjustments’ to OHC data, the Guest post on WUWT by Craig Loehle in 2011 is worth a read:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/20/ocean-heat-content-adjustments-follow-up-and-more-missing-heat/
Lovely graphs, and the punchline is the warming rate of 0.02 degrees per decade.
Visually there is an issue, especially with warming trends. Yellow is a warm color. Not so warm as orange, which in turn is not so warm as red. Green (a mixture of blue and yellow in painting) is neutral. So why are warm and neutral colors used to illustrate cooling? Have these graphics been created by a warmist? 🙂
Willis, would you publish data files behind your Fig. 5 in plain text format? They seem to be inconsistent with the Levitus thing if details are considered.