This is very interesting, not the missing data or that stuff, but the ocean surface temperature looks to be tightly constrained by
the specific volume of the atmosphere and the freezing points of water.
Not exact matches
For homogeneous sytems (the
atmosphere, for example) there is a simple linear relationship that relates the energy
of any part
of the system to the temperature, for example, by
volume E = V C T where V is the
volume of a packet, C the
specific heat per unit
volume and T the temperature.
While it may be that climate change didn't influence the
specific weather system that brought the rain, it is likely to have contributed to the sheer
volume of moisture in the
atmosphere, the paper says.
I've read that because CO2 has a lower
specific heat then other primary gases (Nitrogen / Oxygen) in the
atmosphere when an additional amount CO2 is introduced to a
volume of air inside say a greenhouse the temperature actually drops.