Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
IMAGE: Deployment of an APEX float from a German research ship.
Credit: Argo
The global ocean represents the most important component of the Earth climate system. The oceans accumulate heat energy and transport heat from the tropics to higher latitudes, responding very slowly to changes in the atmosphere. Digital gridded climatologies of the global ocean provide helpful background information for many oceanographic, geochemical and biological applications. Because both the global ocean and the observational basis are changing, periodic updates of ocean climatologies are needed, which is in line with the World Meteorological Organization’s recommendations to provide decadal updates of atmospheric climatologies.
“Constructing ocean climatologies consists of several steps, including data quality control, adjustments for instrumental biases, and filling the data gaps by means of a suitable interpolation method”, says Professor Viktor Gouretski of the University of Hamburg and a scholarship holder of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ President’s International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI) at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the author of a report recently published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters.
“Sea water is essentially a two-component system, with a nonlinear dependency of density on temperature and salinity, with the mixing in the ocean interior taking place predominantly along isopycnal surfaces. Therefore, interpolation of oceanic parameters should be performed on isopycnals rather than on isobaric levels, to minimize production of artificial water masses. The differences between these two methods of data interpolation are most pronounced in the high-gradient regions like the Gulf Stream, Kuroshio, and Antarctic Circumpolar Current,” continues Professor Gouretski.
In his recent report, Professor Gouretski presents a new World Ocean Circulation Experiment/ARGO Global Hydrographic Climatology (WAGHC), with temperature and salinity averaged on local isopycnal surfaces. Based on high-quality ship-board data and temperature and salinity profiles from ARGO floats, the new climatology has a monthly resolution and is available on a 1/4° latitude-longitude grid.
“We have compared the WAGHC climatology with NOAA’s WOA13 gridded climatology. These climatologies represent alternative digital products, but the WAGHC has benefited from the addition of new ARGO float data and hydrographic data from the North Polar regions”, says Professor Gourteski. “The two climatologies characterize mean ocean states that are 25 years apart, and the zonally averaged section of the WAGHC-minus-WOA13 temperature difference clearly shows the ocean warming signal, with a mean temperature increase of 0.05°C for the upper 1500-m layer since 1984”.
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Mumbo jumbo. Delivered as a press release
Correcting Ocean Cooling
Yep. I’m likely the most scientifically ignorant person to love this blog, but I know bullshit from a mile away.
This article is absurd.
0.05 C??? Monthly resolution? Does this idiot know what climate is?
Noise combined with Mike’s Nature trick
The final number is less than the uncertainty of the instruments they are using.
And that’s before factoring the fact that they are using a single instrument to guess at the average temperature of 10’s of thousands of cubic kilometers of sea water.
MarkW
I disagree slightly: the difference is larger than the uncertainty of the calculated final values. The uncertainty of the measurements is, individually, much smaller than the difference.
The missing term is the propagated uncertainty which is made up of (not the sum of) the uncertainties. Take the square root of the sum of the squares of the absolute uncertainty for each measurement. The result will be more that one degree C.
So having stated that they use different raw data and different processing methods the esteemed professor tells us that apples in 2009 are bigger than oranges in 1984.
We must act now !
Crispin:
Perhaps.
But, only if each instrument is tested and certified annually.
Even then, the uncertainty is based upon the results of the testing and certification.
As it stands now, applying the best potential laboratory uncertainty to individual instruments deployed in the oceans.
Where algae, seaweed, gull droppings, barnacles and other sea live infest and contaminate the instruments. All of which should degrade the instrument’s accuracy over time.
Yea, and you can bet they are not just interpolating, they are extrapolating. Big nothing-burger!
That 12/10,000ths of a degree per month, if they really mean monthly resolution. No such measurements can be made. Poppycock.
At least they are admitting that the ocean waters have been warming up (since the end of the LIA)
But they are not going to admit enough “warming” to justify the past 60+ years of increasing atmospheric CO2 which would negate their CAGW “junk science” claims and cut off their Grant monies.
” WOA13 temperature difference clearly shows the ocean warming signal, with a mean temperature increase of 0.05°C for the upper 1500-m layer since 1984”. This is such a tiny increase it can’t be distinguished from data noise. Meaningless.
The final phrase: “…clearly shows the ocean warming signal, with a mean temperature increase of 0.05°C for the upper 1500-m layer since 1984.”
0.05°C in 35 years? Really??
Doesn’t sound like much unless you state it in Hiroshimas.
The idea that we know what the temperature of the ocean to within even 1C 35 years ago is so absurd that only those who are totally uninterested in reality could make it.
Heck, the idea that we know what the average temperature of the oceans is TODAY, within 1C is utterly absurd.
“a mean temperature increase of 0.05°C for the upper 1500-m layer since 1984”
Thats a huge volume and a huge amount of energy. What about 300-m, the layer that interacts with the atmosphere? It looks like it’s pushing 0.4°C from here: https://www.ocean-sci.net/14/1127/2018/os-14-1127-2018.pdf
What about the 50-m layer how is it going? I see the surface is galloping past 0.5°C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_surface_temperature
Meh, I guess a watched pot never boils.
“a mean temp increase of 0.05 degrees C”?
…and the error of the estimate is…?
…and the “thermometers” are accurate to … what?
Can a temperature “average” be any more accurate than the resolution of a single thermometer?
In math, it can calculate to as many decimal places as required, but isn’t that exercise pointless?
That ought to melt a couple Antarctic ice sheets in NO TIME!
At least we “know” the ocean is warming. Imagine if the results showed THAT MUCH COOLING!
It would require a different “adjustment”.
If the top 50 meters warmed by an average of 0.5°C, and the next 1450 meters didn’t warm at all, then the average warming for the top 1500 meters would be 0.0167°C. So fully one-third of the total warming of the upper 1500 meters is attributable to warming in the top 50 meters.
Loydo wrote, “What about 300-m, the layer that interacts with the atmosphere? It looks like it’s pushing 0.4°C from here”
I haven’t read that paper, but if the top 300 meters warm by 0.4°C, that would, by itself, warm the average temperature of the top 1500 meters by 0.08°C. So if the top 300 meters warm by 0.4°C and the average temperature of the top 1500 meters only warms by 0.05°C, then it means the 300-1500 meter water has cooled.
Dave Burton … 4:13 pm
0.05°C in 35 years? Really??
You aren’t paying attention. That’s old hat. The IPCC’s AR4 Chapter 5
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg1-chapter5-1.pdf
tells us in the first sentence of the Executive Summary:
The oceans are warming. Over the period 1961 to 2003, global ocean temperature has risen by 0.10°C from the surface to a depth of 700 m.
Well OK, maybe 0.05°C in 35 years IS more ridiculous than 0.10°C in 42 years, but let’s not quibble (-:
0.10°C in 42 years
= 0.02380952 °C/decade, for the top 700 meters.
If the next 800 meters didn’t warm at all, that would be
= 0.01111111 °C/decade, for the top 1500 meters.
0.05°C in 35 years
= 0.01428571 °C/decade, for the top 1500 meters.
That’s 0.00317460 °C/decade faster warming!
It’s Worse Than We Thought.™
Dave Burton May 11, 2019 at 12:46 am
…
It’s Worse Than We Thought.™
From my file of tag lines, quotes & smart remarks:
We can at least assume from this 0.05 ºC + or minus ?? over 35 years, that the increase in temperature is small and that unsurprisingly the oceans act to moderate the global temperature with their large heat capacity. The surprise is that the atmosphere is apparently showing about a 10x larger change over this same period. Is this difference caused by a limited mixing of ocean waters? Can atmospheric temperatures get that far away from ocean temperatures?
I don’t believe it, how can one research vessel plus some other data say
that the vast Oceans are warming, or cooling.
As with all things it depends on just where one measures things, the
Equator or the Pole, or in between.
MJE VK5ELL
0.05C… impossible to get that high a degree of resolution from that amount of samples on that large a scale.
The best instruments they have barely manage to get to that degree of resulution.
Beg to differ. From ARGO’s FAQ page.
“The temperatures in the Argo profiles are accurate to ± 0.002°C and pressures are accurate to ± 2.4dbar…”
Hope this isn’t a duplicate, but here goes.
Beg to differ. From the ARGO FAQ page.
“The temperatures in the Argo profiles are accurate to ± 0.002°C and pressures are accurate to ± 2.4dbar…”
I believe the argo floats use thermistor sensors for temperature measurement. I can find no commercial thermistor that has an accuracy of more than 0.1degC based on the assumption of a linear change in resistance. Manual calibration curves could potentially lower than by a factor of 10 to 0.01degC. While the Argo specs are +/- .002degC I suspect that is actually the *resolution* and not the accuracy. A micrometer can read down to +/- .0005m but that doesn’t mean the accuracy is +/- .0005m.
I have a fancy LED display on my milling machine that can tell me the position of the table within 0.0005″, the mill was made in 1942 so what the LED says and reality are completely different. And as 0.005″ is enough for my needs I tell it to only display the first 3 digits.
@Tim Gorman
Well, here you go:
https://us.flukecal.com/products/temperature-calibration/probes-sensors/platinum-resistance-thermometers-prts/5627a-precisio?quicktabs_product_details=2
I offer this only as an illustration, not a comment on the AGRO claim of 0.002.
D.J. – the figures on the unit you linked to are “calibrated” figures. Like I said, you can probably gain a 10-times increase in accuracy by using a manual calibration curve for each unit. That would put the uncalibrated accuracy for this unit at +/- 0.4degC at 0degC. There *are* better units out there. You also need to look at the drift rate, +/- .04degC The drift rate is nearly equal to the measurement tolerance at 0degC. None of this gives me any confidence in the +/- .002degC figure of the Argo float. I still say that is probably the resolution, not the actual accuracy.
Interesting link, D.J. Hawkins.
Re: “Drift Rate (k=2) ± 0.04 °C at 0 °C after 100 hours at 420 °C”
Does only drift if you get it hot? Or does it still drift even if you never raise its temperature above 40 °C?
Well, how many cubic kilometers is each ARGO bouy supposed to measure.
1000, 10,000?
I’m impressed with the accuracy and stability of those temperature sensors.
Imagine — multiple sensors in a sea environment to a depth of 1500 Meters with a sensitivity of less than 0.05 degrees and stable over 25 years.
Unless, of course, that’s not exactly what they did. . . .
You mean that “high quality shipboard data”? 😉
Water temperatures taken from engine intakes are taken at different depths depending on how heavily the ship is loaded. An empty tanker rides a lot higher in the water than a full one, which certainly must affect the temperature of the water coming in.
You might think that water temperatures taken by tossing a canvas bag over the rail and hauling it back up could be fairly consistent, but I doubt it. The railing you toss your bucket over will be higher above the water on an empty ship — did you adjust the line length on your bucket? Also, full ships are slower than empty ships, which probably affects the depth to which your bucket sinks. Also, full ships churn the water deeper, causing local mixing, which probably also affects the water temperature in your bucket.
Also, typical ship sizes and speeds, and probably routes, have changed over 35 years, and that surely affects temperatures, for all of those same reasons, and probably introduces a spurious trend.
The bottom line is that I agree with the rest of you folks: there’s no way this data is good enough to support their conclusion.
Sounds very much like a preface for the need to “Karlize” the accumulated Argo data to get rid on the zero slope of temperature increase over the last 19 years, and thus to show that oceans over the globe support the CAGW meme.
0.05Celsius.
The horror.
Um, what might the error bars be?
On this;””Constructing ocean climatologies consists of several steps, including data quality control, adjustments for instrumental biases, and filling the data gaps by means of a suitable interpolation method”, says Professor Viktor Gouretski “.
I realize it is too much to ask of the practioneers of Climatology to honestly state the variation in range of their “educated guesses”.
But to claim a signal of 0.05 after making the above statement is just too much.
As my work occasionally calls upon me to calibrate temperature sensors, the claim or even suggestion that a remote operating bouy can produce data that is reliably accurate to 0.01 C is stunningly absurd,that it would stay within calibration over the seasons is an even more asinine assumption.
The willful ignorance of measuring systems and methods that pervades Climatology is the primary reason it will never rise above being a cult.
Rant over.Yes I am fully aware that in this business of policy based evidence maanufacturing, requires such dishonesty.
”with a mean temperature increase of 0.05°C for the upper 1500-m layer since 1984”.
so less than 0.20°C/century. That seems okay to me.
CC is not a question of IF, but a question of “how much.”
We can definitely live with that “how much.”
And, once again, we see a “mean” offered up with no associated error band. For a 0.05degC mean to make physical sense the temperature measurement devices would have to have an an error band measured in thousandths of a degC otherwise this is nothing more than an artifact of arithmetic. Are we truly supposed to believe these measurement devices have errors measured in the thousandths of a degC? Once again, means calculated from independent measurement devices measuring independent samples do not follow the rule of large numbers and an error band for the measurement devices must be presented in order for the mean to make sense.
How has this requirement gotten so lost today in the field of science?
Tim G,
To sum up: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha !
clearly shows five hundreth celsius since 1984.scary
I know the ARGO float website claims that the “The temperatures in the Argo profiles are accurate to ± 0.002°C,” but the temperature and salinity data are truncated to two decimal places. There is no way on earth anyone could derive a +0.05 C temperature rise from such data.
And, by the way, the ± 0.002°C accuracy citation refers to the platinum resistance thermometers, not the installed and as-operated temperature sensors.
“Constructing ocean climatologies consists of several steps, including data quality control, adjustments for instrumental biases, and filling the data gaps by means of a suitable interpolation method”
…and we added all the numbers up…divided by how many numbers we had….and got 0.05
Did BEST teach them how to do that?
“and filling the data gaps by means of a suitable interpolation method”
Otherwise known as a best guess.
Usually the guess that’s chosen is the one most likely to result in the answer you were looking for in the first place.
Yes, WAG HC is a very appropriate acronym. WAG indeed.
Ha! “WAG Hydrographic Climatology” — perfect!
5/100th of a degree…in 35 years…..I think they just disproved global ocean warming
Heat as apposed to temperature……
Try working out the mass of the 1.5Km of water and multiply that by 4 (SH) to obtain a comparison with the temperature that that amount of energy would manifest in air.
The top 1.5Km of oceans weighs more than 100X that of the whole of the atmosphere.
The SH of water is 4x that of air.
So the 0.05C of warming would be 400x greater if applied to the whole atmosphere (and could somehow be stored).
That gives 200C.
“I think they just disproved global ocean warming”
On the contrary my friend.
What is it with tr0lls and this “my friend” snot? This guy probably has .05 friends, but his math produces 200, a very popular guy by his own reckoning.
If you say so my friend.
I see that even my amateurish mind balking at 0.05 C. in a fit of laughter was not too far off base.
And, even if it were remotely possible, in hell-frozen-over, to measure the “global ocean” [more laughter] to this number of decimal places, it’s … ZERO, POINT, ZERO, FIVE DEGREES ! ! ! — beyond any sensible and rational quantity worth concern — practically ZERO — meaning no warming.
Seriously, indeed !
And Friday was going so well.
Look it’s ok, most of that increase is tucked away at the north pole, wait…
“The global ocean represents the most important component of the Earth climate system. The oceans accumulate heat energy and transport heat from the tropics to higher latitudes, responding very slowly to changes in the atmosphere.”
What changes in the atmosphere?
It appears that they have started with the assumption that CO2 will make the atmosphere warmer and that, in turn, will make the oceans warmer. They use completely inadequate sampling of the oceans from which no scientific conclusions could possibly be made, then use statistical methods to squeeze out the results that they intended to find in the first place.
Once again, natural cycles in the oceans are ignored, along with natural climate cycles, and the assumption is that every change, real or imagined, is the result of a slight change in the concentration of a trace gas in the atmosphere.
This isn’t science. This is putting together a jigsaw puzzle with the no picture on the box, but a preconceived idea of what the picture should be. The method is simple. Force the pieces to go together! If they don’t go together, throw the errant pieces away and claim you are getting close to solving the puzzle!
Since the Argo system didn’t exist in 1984, it’s not possible to make accurate comparisons using it in his research.
Seems to me the conclusion was reached before the work began.
Someone might get me to accept an average temperature increase in the upper 1500 m of water HAD THEY LIMITED THE DATE RANGE to that of the ARGO data, which begins in late 2007 when they reached 3000 floats in operation.
The data prior to 2005 is far too undersampled and poorly distributed to make any claim of temperature change. The claim of 1984 destroyed any credibility the authors had to that point.
0,05 .. I.e. no warming ..
If your oven warmed at that rate, dinner would be delayed several centuries.
Hehe, yeah…
I typically bake at 350°F to 400°F. To warm the oven from 80°F ambient on a summer day to 350°F = a change of 270°F = 150°C.
150°C × (35 years/ 0.05°C) = 105,000 years = 1050 centuries.
If the recipe calls for preheating the oven to 350°F, you can start baking sometime during the next interglacial.
I think you would find that in 12 years, that dinner would be burnt to a cinder
Except you’d have to refrigerate it while it cooked to keep it from spoiling.
“mean temperature increase of 0.05°C for the upper 1500-m layer since 1984”
A little yellow Minion with hard hat and red light jumps out: “Weeedooo-weeedooo-weeedooo!”
So the ocean has warmed on average 0.05C in 35 years? Let’s just pretend their margin-of-error is less than that (come on, I know its hard, but PRETEND) and imagine Natural warming has occurred at somewhere around 1C per 100 years. The ocean would be trailing as it will warm much slower, so if the warming in the atmosphere (call it 0.35C over 35 years on Average) were 100% natural, than this amount of ocean warming would actually be expected.
Please…they actually spend government money for someone to publish this stuff? I want a REFUND!
Chinese government money, so that’s OK…
I won’t believe it until Mickey Mann produces a kelp ring graph that confirms it.
“assumption”
But it’s a reasonable assumption. If it didn’t “make the atmosphere warmer” a whole lot of basic physics would need over-turning. Is that what you propose?
“What changes in the atmosphere?”
The observed, rapid ones. The picture, including natural cycles, is clearly on the box you just need to open your eyes.