UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII AT MANOA
Using future projections from the latest generation of Earth System Models, a recent study published in Science Advances found that most of the world’s ocean is steadily losing its year-to-year memory under global warming.
Compared with the fast weather fluctuations of the atmosphere, the slowly varying ocean exhibits strong persistence, or “memory”, meaning the ocean temperature tomorrow is likely to look a lot like it does today, with only slight changes. As a result, ocean memory is often used for predicting ocean conditions.
Ocean memory decline is found as a collective response across the climate models to human-induced warming. As greenhouse-gas concentrations continue to rise, such memory decline will become increasingly evident.
“We discovered this phenomenon by examining the similarity in ocean surface temperature from one year to the next as a simple metric for ocean memory,” said Hui Shi, lead author and researcher at the Farallon Institute in Petaluma, California. “It’s almost as if the ocean is developing amnesia.”
Ocean memory is found to be related to the thickness of the uppermost layer of the ocean, known as the mixed layer. Deeper mixed layers have greater heat content, which confers more thermal inertia that translates into memory. However, the mixed layer over most oceans will become shallower in response to continued anthropogenic warming, resulting in a decline in ocean memory.
“Other processes, such as changes in ocean currents and changes in the energy exchange between the atmosphere and ocean, also contribute to changes in ocean memory, but the shoaling of the mixed layer depth and resulting memory decline happens in all regions of the globe, and this makes it an important factor to consider for future climate predictions,” said Robert Jnglin Wills, a research scientist at University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, and co-author of the research.
Along with ocean memory decline, the thinning mixed layer is also found to increase the random fluctuations of the sea surface temperature. As a result, although the ocean will not become much more variable from one year to the next in the future, the fraction of helpful signals for prediction largely reduces.
“Reduced ocean memory together with increased random fluctuations suggest intrinsic changes in the system and new challenges in prediction under warming,” said Fei-Fei Jin, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, and co-author of the research.
Ocean memory loss doesn’t just impact the prediction of physical variables, but could also influence the way we manage sensitive marine ecosystems.
“Reduced memory means less time in advance for a forecast to be made. This could hinder our ability to predict and prepare for ocean change including marine heatwaves, which are known to have caused sudden and pronounced changes in ocean ecosystems around the world,” said Michael Jacox, a research scientist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Monterey, California, and co-author of the research.
In fisheries management, the biological parameters used for stock assessment are estimated assuming a stable environment represented by the recent past. Reduced ocean memory might render such estimation inaccurate and calls for new approaches in ecosystem-based fisheries management to include real-time ocean monitoring and other efforts alike. Ocean memory decline also likely exerts impacts on populations of biological resources. Depending on whether the species are adapted to constant or more variable environmental conditions, future changes in their population can be better estimated and predicted by taking ocean memory loss into consideration.
Besides ocean prediction, forecasting land-based impacts on temperature, precipitation as well as extreme events might also be affected by ocean memory decline due to their dependence on the persistence of sea surface temperature as a predictability source. As ocean memory continues to decline, researchers will likely be challenged to search for alternative predictors for skillful predictions.
The research is a collaboration among scientists at:
● Farallon Institute
● University of Hawaii at Manoa
● University of Washington
● NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
● NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory
● University of Arizona
● NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center
JOURNAL
Science Advances
DOI
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Data/statistical analysis
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Global decline in ocean memory over the 21st century
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
6-May-2022
COI STATEMENT
The authors declare that they have no competing interests
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” ….. human-induced warming.”
Link to proof, please.
There isn’t any, as you well know.
You need to trust these people, they’re
high-priestsscientistsThermal inertia does not “translate to memory” – it’s all thermal inertia. This is what happens when a bunch of stoned hippies take a pseudo-science course and anthropomorphise the planet as some sort of ‘goddess’.
And this just in from another YouReekAlot! article…
Climate Change has Reduced Joe Biden’s memory to a series of events he made up in 1973.
CO2 causes Old Timers disease. Obviously.
Seems like it’s more like diarrhea than amnesia.
After 4.6BY a little
Salinitysenility is to be expectedlol
Including diarrhea of the mouth…
In a comment on Willis’ post yesterday about CET, I naively asked if he knew a way to shift the
conversation from global temps to oceanic thermal heat content & transference which I think are
much more important & revealing metrics. Within a day, a post shows how the The Team™ lied
about ocean data & gave a basic concept a meaningless woke name. That’s the same old stuff,
different day! I forgot whatever they touch will be used as propaganda.There’s no way around it! 🙁
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/07/the-parts-and-the-whole/#comment-3512666
Speaking of propaganda, this from Seth Goebbelstein is so moronic, it made me almost wet my pants laughing:
https://apnews.com/article/climate-scientists-optimism-d1f2de75f853af68fef4f5a7e3e69071
Saw the headline earlier today but did not read the article until your comment. I was hoping for a good laugh or at least and interesting read.
I did have trouble following the logic of the journalist,
I couldn’t make it past the first few paragraphs. The scientist had a lot of bad luck and tragedies just before the pandemic and somehow it segued to her being people’s climate therapist – how to stay positive when faced with all the damage.
Here’s a better way than trusting a climate bedwetter activist with making one feel better about the environment – do some actual research and digging to find out what is really going on and stop listening to the muck raising media.
I believe it was Mark Twain that said something like, if you don’t read the newspaper you will be uniformed, and if you do read the newspaper you will be misinformed.
Now, now now! We all know that AGW magically changes the laws of physics and properties of water heat sinks!! Come on, man, get with the picture!!
(do I really need to add the “/snark” tag? )
They would have been even better if the bears started out skinny
I think part of the point is that the bears are doing just fine as it is. :0)
OK then how about another panel with the bears puking “That was Rancid”
Works for me!! <g>
The article begins with, “Using future projections from the latest generation of Earth System Models…”
That’s as far as anyone needs to read to know the study is computer-generated nonsense.
Regards,
Bob
Good of them to do that as it saves lots of time.
Hey, it’s “the latest generation” of models! Not like the older generation models that were no good for anything. 😉
i saw noticed that too bob, but i still skimmed through the article just to punish my self.
It was blessedly short.
If we know that the recent 3My have been the coldest of the last 200My can we presume that oceans didn’t have memory most of the time. But if you have a colder climate like between two interglacials temperature fluctuations become even bigger. What does that do with the ocean memory. What about La Nina El Nino events ?
The problem is that it’s models all the way down…No reality.
Well, this nonsense is easily forgotten
Good One !!
That’s a bit of a problem, these forecasts are what’s remembered. Particularly in this sort of case when a rebuttal can take weeks or months and is not published in the gutter press,
A lot of predictions by the Met Office have been published in national and local press in the UK over the last two or three weeks, it’s yet to materialise in Derby. But what people remember is that a heatwave was forecast so it must have happened. I’m not a conspiracy theorist so I put it down to ineptitude of the MO and incompetence of the press and Gullibility of a large section of the public
So they found the effect by examining models of predicted future ocean warming rather than looking at actual ocean conditions over the past 40 years…. it’s as if they knew they could only find what they were looking for in models.
See my comment below, just posted.
Well the actual article does point to research that indicated a drop of about 5% over 6 decades in however they measured stratification.
But that study only found that extra stratification by going to a depth of 2000m instead of the 200m that they said was previously used.
I found that fishy, since the layer these scientists are panicking about is only 50m, and it was only a change of .9% per decade and most of the changes in the more recent decades – when temperatures have been relatively flat since after the 1998 El Nino.
The stratification seems mostly determined by salinity differences, and while the Arctic reduction in sea ice extent added lots of fresh water, that extent seems stabilized now, and anyhuge differences eventually even themselves out with continued mixing.
I think this is going to be another case of climate scientists noticing a symptom and turning it into a disease. Salinity and stratification leading to… something instead of being just a transition to a new equilibrium level; CO2 levels increasing to set the world on fire, instead of just being the result of coming out of the Little Ice Age since the depth of the cold in 1700.
We need to ‘woke up’ the oceans, then…
Oh dear, the fetch forgot what it was doing. How will we ever survive? And its all your fault, just like everything else. Please send money so we can play with our computers, we are a little short. Thank you.
Papers like this serve to demonstrate how dramatic has been the separation between “climate science” and reality.
Government funded by the big three modeling agencies NOAA, NSF and DOE. Buying scares.
“Funding: This work was supported by Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections Program grant NA19OAR4310290 (Climate Program Office, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to H.S., M.G.-R., W.J.S., and R.R.R.; U.S. National Science Foundation grant AGS-1813611 (F.-F.J.); U.S. Department of Energy grant DE-SC0005110 (F.-F.J.); U.S. National Science Foundation grant AGS-1929775 (R.C.J.W.); and CIRES Postdoctoral Visiting Fellowship (D.J.A.)”
We need to start chucking blueberries and avocados into the ocean. They are supposed to be good for the memory…..
Nothing short of virgins will do.
Good luck finding one over 15 ! ( Blame “progressive teachers” for teaching anything goes sex ed to grade 5 students ! )
Madonna? She’s “like” a virgin …
Virgins? We’re doomed!
Hands up who thinks this story gives the impression this ‘memory loss’ in the oceans has already begun.
“Declining”, “is steadily”, “is developing” “We discovered this phenomenon”, all imply that something is already happening.
Do honest scientists try to mislead people?
These dishonest scientists definitely tried to mislead. ARGO sees nothing of what they assert is already happening. Just checked. Reference in comment following.
Models!
I thought, what does ARGO observe? Found a perfect on point paper in GRL at 2017GL073426 titled ‘An ARGO mixed layer climatology’. Built from about 1250000 separate ARGO profiles from 2003 to 2017, and computed two ways. The complete database with computed mixed layer depths (MLD) is available at http://mixedlayer.uscd.edu.
Turns out the MLD has a strong seasonal component—shallower in summer. Hence the climatology. Turns out that it also varieties geographically (deeper in the turbulent Southern ocean) and annually. But based on the paper’s database, and Fig. 3b for the Labrador Sea, there is NO general shallowing caused by global warming over the period to 2017. NONE.
It is only in climate models of what the future might be. Another bogey man lurking under the warmunist bed.
Yes I’m hoping that Musk introduces a tag for tweets about “modeled” research, something like –
*** FERTILE IMAGINATION APPLIED ***
Mr. I’d like to agree with you except that this is the same B.S. playing out in the same way, over and over with just a different title – so it’s got to be: “***Limited Imagination Applied***”
I prefer the lawyers line – ” Objection, speculative”
Of course they didn’t look at the paper you cited (btw the link doesn’t work) but found another that does, sort of (.9% increase in stratification per DECADE and they had to change the methodology, by looking down to a depth of 2000m, to find even that much.)
So decades of ocean measurements that did not show this “memory loss” suddenly are negated because models. Based on an assumed climate sensitivity to CO2 that is likely far higher than the actual climate response. Every one of these stories just reads like bullshit being peddled in order to get another round of funding.
Just once I’d like to see claims resulting from investigative facts instead of models. We’ve created a monster by allowing modeling to take the place of science and be taken for truth.
The map is not the territory.
That’s not a map, it’s a doodle that someone coloured in using crayons.
Modeling has a place in science. The problem is that the current generation of scientists has elevated the importance of poorly understood physical systems, as expressed in computer models, above the importance of empirical observations. More data might be able to improve the models, but everyone seems to be too busy cranking out predictions from the existing models to gather the much needed data.
It is like the computer games they play. Baseball, basketball, fishing, first person shooters, you name it. They become real in the imagination part of the brain. Therefore, computer weather models are no different – they become real too.
Verified, validated models have a place in science and engineering.
“Ocean memory loss doesn’t just impact the prediction of physical variables, but could also influence the way we manage sensitive marine ecosystems. ” I guess that without a memory, literacy is not possible. Didn’t teach such courses when I took and even taught a little oceanography. Learn something new every day!
Special Issue: Future Seas 2030: Pathways to Sustainability
Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries https://futureseas2030.org/
Ocean literacy experiential learning. “When we dance the ocean, does it hear us Equity of our future oceans: practices and outcomes in marine science research” Trying to outdo the water striders out there? Ocean & atmosphere boundary layers are quite a place, easier and maybe more fun to study other aspects.
From the paper, first in abstract– “This global decline in ocean memory is predominantly driven by shoaling of the upper-ocean mixed layer depth in response to global surface warming, while thermodynamic and dynamic feedbacks can contribute substantially regionally.”
First line in Introduction– “More than two-thirds of Earth’s surface is covered by ocean,….”
In Results–“The 1-year autocorrelation of annual mean SST anomalies [hereafter referred to as A(1)] is used as a simple metric of the year-to-year ocean memory (Materials and Methods). The SST anomalies are defined as deviation from the long-term trends (Materials and Methods) ….. Just as the shoaling of the MLD is the main reason for the decline in ocean memory, it is also the reason for the increase in noise variance (Materials and Methods).” MLDs (Mixed layer depth) SST (Sea surface temperature for those of you that didn’t know about the size of the ocean).
Materials and Methods “ We use CMIP6 output of SST, MLD, surface latent heat flux, surface sensible heat flux, and surface radiative fluxes from the preindustrial control simulations, historical simulations, and various SSP (65) scenarios, including SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5. We selected a total of 20 CMIP6 models…..”
I suppose that we had some memory about noise variation back then, and they did show in their references that there actually were some thermodynamic measurements made in the last millennium. I also learned about another NOAA program (Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections ). They need to go to sea and measure some real (not so sensitive and autocorrelated) thermoclines!
SSP5-8.5. No wonder.
Hard to square this research with NASA and other research suggesting ocean overturning take about 1000 years….
https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.1105531
Gentle correction. You confound two different things.
The deep ocean overturning is how long it takes very cold and very salty from sea ice formation exudate (thus heavy) polar winter water sinking to the ocean bottom to resurface as an upwelling somewhere. Estimates vary, but your 1000 years is a good central estimate (estimated range 1200-800).
The mixed surface layer depth isn’t polar except in high summer. It is the euphotic surface (sunlight penetrating biologically relevant photosynthesis zone, condition dependent about 80 to no more than 150 meters), plus whatever might lie just below in similar temperature and salinity conditions due to wave action turbulence mixing. So inherently deeper in the southern ocean ‘roaring forties’ and ‘screaming 50s’.
Projections of projections of inferred images in the signs.
So, when the oceans don’t do as the computer models ‘predict’ it is the ocean’s fault? I think the memory problem is with those to tout these failed models.
“The ocean is losing it’s memory”
In this case I think this will be difficult to trace back to the primary cause.
Do the most obvious and important things first.
They need to do a multi-variate study to determine if simple old age is the primary cause.
Simple aging is far and away the most common cause of memory loss.
(So much for YouReekAlerts)
“The ocean is losing it’s memory”
Yeeeehaaawwwww! – Jethro Bodine Esquire
… and these dummies are university academics?!
Oceans do not have memory, they have thermal capacity, I would be tempted to call it ‘thermal hysteresis’ (the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, whereby down cycle may not follow rate path of the preceding up cycle, e.g. oceans may not cool and heat at the same rate).
Also oceans might be subject to long term natural cycles, such as centenary or millennial solar cycles, the millennium+ long great conveyor belt cycle, AMO and PDO cycles whose causes are not entirely certain. I believe there also some long term tidal cycles that might affect temperature behaviour of costal waters, i.e. the whole panoply of cyclomania, you might say (: .
The simpler explanation is that so called ‘memory’ will remain in nature, and this work demonstrates a limitation in gcms.
I agree, and I want to add that scientists will generate bogus predictions when trying to simplify a process like the oceans’ thermal capacity by pretending it’s memory – exactly the same bs they are doing by treating the lapse rate affected by CO2 levels as “downwelling radiation” or “CO2 forcing” – unjustified simplification, especially if they persist in prophesying a century in the future.
Our planet is 4.543 billion years old. Of course, it’s suffering from little dementia.
Is that petite dementia versus grand dementia?
“Reduced ocean memory results in shorter lead times of skillful persistence-based predictions …”?
What on Earth are these fools going on about?
Is it dementia or senility? April fool was 5 weeks ago.
Sorry, April Fools Day was cancelled this year because nothing could equal the crazy crap the “liberal left” has put us through in the last two years ! MAGA !
“using projections from models…” <—- not science
What a sorry excuse for science! How can the science community continue to allow trash like this to be published without a vigorous challenge?
It is the climate science community. They publish trash all the time; it’s their M.O. Because otherwise they got nothing after 40 years of ignominiously failed predictions.
Rud, I really appreciate that WUWT posts these papers otherwise I would never know about them, but I swear it makes me think I am reading National Enquirer.
Don’t knock National Enquirer, first saw the discovery of the Megamouth Shark there. Picture on cover I seem to remember by the grocery checkout.
So next month is the 50th anniversary of the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP) in Stockholm.
https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/stockholm1972
Which gave birth exactly 20 years later (1992) to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro.
https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/rio1992.
Wouldn’t it be timely and fitting for a talented writer to “celebrate” the 50th anniversary of dud climate predictions next month by compiling and publishing a list of all these failures, and a prediction of what further climate prediction failures we can look forward to for the next decade or so?
Rud?