Sentences with phrase «term warming of the oceans»

Despite being only 0.1 to 1 mm thick on average, this skin layer is the major player in the long - term warming of the oceans.

That's why the long - term warming of the ocean heat content for the tropical Pacific was plainly caused by the 3 - year La Niña events of 1954 - 57, 1973 - 76 and 1998 - 01, and during the freakish 1995/96 La Niña.

Not exact matches

This year, the Atlantic was warmer than average — Klotzbach says August through October will likely rank third or fourth in terms of highest tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures.

While natural patterns of certain atmospheric and ocean conditions are already known to influence Greenland melt, the study highlights the importance of a long - term warming trend to account for the unprecedented west Greenland melt rates in recent years.

«The beauty of this study is that easily acquired measures of reef complexity and depth provide a means of predicting long term consequences of ocean warming events,» Dr Wilson says.

The coverage of living corals on Australia's Great Barrier Reef could decline to less than 10 percent if ocean warming continues, according to a new study that explores the short - and long - term consequences of environmental changes to the reef.

However, certain areas in the oceans could be unusually warm and skew the overall long - term average temperature results of some of those prior studies, Shuman says.

«Warm summers could weaken ocean circulation: Long - term observations reveal the influence of increased surface freshening on convection in the subpolar North Atlantic.»

Caroline Ummenhofer of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and her colleagues wanted to know how much of the blame laid with that year's La Niña — and how much was caused by longer - term ocean warming.

The research, published in Nature Communications, examined preserved fossil remains of coccolithophores from a period of climate warming and ocean acidification that occurred around 56 million years ago — the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)-- and provides a much - needed long - term perspective of coccolithophore response to ocean acidification.

A detailed, long - term ocean temperature record derived from corals on Christmas Island in Kiribati and other islands in the tropical Pacific shows that the extreme warmth of recent El Niño events reflects not just the natural ocean - atmosphere cycle but a new factor: global warming caused by human activity.

So the report notes that the current «pause» in new global average temperature records since 1998 — a year that saw the second strongest El Nino on record and shattered warming records — does not reflect the long - term trend and may be explained by the oceans absorbing the majority of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases as well as the cooling contributions of volcanic eruptions.

Most people in the general public now know the term, and they have a vague idea that it is some kind of pattern in the Pacific Ocean that means the U.S. will have a warm winter... or snowy winter... or hot summer — or something.

«The information will be a critical complement to future long - term projections of sea level rise, which depend on melting ice and warming oceans.»

«This kind of study discusses the natural cycle and could help define the likely positive feedbacks we can expect in the long - term future, [for example] as temperatures warm, the ocean will want to give up more CO2, or rather absorb less,» says climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies.

With the sun continuing to heat the ocean water at the tropical latitudes regardless of ice cap conditions up north, it would seem that the presence of an ice cap would result in a warmer ocean over the long term, with the converse also being true.

Observations of upper ocean heat show some short term cooling but measurements to greater depths (down to 2000 metres) show a steady warming trend: However, the ocean cooling myth does seem to be widespread so I'll shortly update this page to clarify the issue.

Unlike the Arctic, there is no long - term submarine record of ice thickness — but with the warming Southern Ocean, it seems likely that that has been going on as well.

The open ocean around the atoll was 2 degrees Celsius warmer than usual, but a short - term change in weather conditions pushed temperatures on top of the reef to 6 degrees Celsius above normal.

However, if one downweights these two events (either by eliminating or, as in Cane et al» 97, using a «robust» trend), then an argument can be made for a long - term pattern which is in some respects more «La Nina» - like, i.e. little warming in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific, and far more warming in the western equatorial Pacific and Indian oceans, associated with a strengthening, not weakening, of the negative equatorial Pacific zonal SST gradient.

So, while the oceans are a heat sink in the short - term, warmer oceans are a source of climate gases in the long - term.

(1) The warm sea surface temperatures are not just some short - term anomaly but are part of a long - term observed warming trend, in which ocean temperatures off the US east coast are warming faster than global average temperatures.

The findings have important implications in terms of planning for sea level rise, as ever - growing coastal communities might have to plan for even higher ocean levels in a warmer future.

Ocean surfaces have warmed considerably over the last few years, and since oceans cover roughly tw0 - thirds of the globe's area, it is reasonable to examine how sea surface temperature evolution has played into the short - term evolution of GMST.

If more of the heat from global warming is going into the ocean, does that reduce the amount of surface warming (both transiently and long - term) that we should expect from doubling CO2?

The long - term warming of the planet, as well as an exceptionally strong El Niño, led to numerous climate records in 2015, including milestones for global temperatures, carbon dioxide levels and ocean heat, according to the World Meteorological Organization's annual State of the Climate Report.

Mr. Trenberth was lamenting the inadequacy of observing systems to fully monitor warming trends in the deep ocean and other aspects of the short - term variations that always occur, together with the long - term human - induced warming trend.

At the same time, increasing depth and duration of drought, along with warmer temperatures enabling the spread of pine beetles has increased the flammability of this forest region — http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n9/full/nclimate1293.html http://www.vancouversun.com/fires+through+tinder+pine+beetle+killed+forests/10047293/story.html Can climate models give different TCR and ECS with different timing / extent of when or how much boreal forest burns, and how the soot generated alters the date of an ice free Arctic Ocean or the rate of Greenland ice melt and its influence on long term dynamics of the AMOC transport of heat?

The main point is that just as surface temperatures has experienced periods of short term cooling during long term global warming, similarly the ocean shows short term variability during a long term warming trend.

The second is a short - term period of warmer surface waters in the Pacific Ocean (called an El Niño).

In any year, temperatures around the world can be nudged up or down by short - term factors like volcanic eruptions or El Ninos, when warm water spreads over much of the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Buffalo City, as East London is charmingly known, not only lies on one of the most sublime coastlines of the world - think warm Indian Ocean waters and sub-tropical weather that allow visitors to enjoy the climate all year round - it also basks gloriously between the Nahoon River in the north and the Buffalo River to the south of the city, and the phrase «unspoilt beaches» was termed with East London's beaches in mind.

Given how much yelling takes place on the Internet, talk radio, and elsewhere over short - term cool and hot spells in relation to global warming, I wanted to find out whether anyone had generated a decent decades - long graph of global temperature trends accounting for, and erasing, the short - term up - and - down flickers from the cyclical shift in the tropical Pacific Ocean known as the El Niño — Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, cycle.

A very consistent understanding is thus emerging of the coupled ocean and atmosphere dynamics that have caused the recent decadal - scale departure from the longer - term global warming trend.

Ice - sheet responses to decadal - scale ocean forcing appear to be less important, possibly indicating that the future response of the Antarctic Ice Sheet will be governed more by long - term anthropogenic warming combined with multi-centennial natural variability than by annual or decadal climate oscillations.»

Given that the cryosphere and oceans are far better long - term indicators of changes in Earth's energy balance than the much more «noisy» troposphere, for anyone to suggest that the warming of the Earth system has slowed or stopped over the past 10 years, means they are purposely ignoring the far bigger heat sinks of the cryrosphere and oceans, or they simply want to spout nonsense.

In general, the regions of expanding warming upwelling water in the Indian Ocean, North Pacific, or wherever they are, must create slight bulges in the surface, and the regions of shrinking, cooling, sinking water in the Arctic must create slight depressions in the sea surface (again, I mean in a very low pass sense — obviously storms, tides, etc, create all kinds of short - terms signals obscuring this).

In either case, we see no evidence of any long term warming trend, in either the atmosphere or the ocean.

Long - term effects of warming and ocean acidification are modified by seasonal variation in species responses and environmental conditions

However, if one downweights these two events (either by eliminating or, as in Cane et al» 97, using a «robust» trend), then an argument can be made for a long - term pattern which is in some respects more «La Nina» - like, i.e. little warming in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific, and far more warming in the western equatorial Pacific and Indian oceans, associated with a strengthening, not weakening, of the negative equatorial Pacific zonal SST gradient.

When I wrote «In either case, we see no evidence of any long term warming trend, in either the atmosphere or the ocean,» that should have read «long term warming trend due to CO2 emissions...» There may be some evidence consistent with long term warming in the oceans, but I can't see how that could be due to CO2, for reasons given above.

In terms of the gold that a climate science denier might find in the paper, at the very least, they could argue that the fact that the troposphere isn't warming more quickly than the surface shows that the climate models are unreliable — even though the models predict just the pattern of warming that we see — with the troposphere warming more quickly than the surface over the ocean but less quickly than the surface over land.

From what I see from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) of land temperatures and the Comprehensive Ocean - Atmosphere Data Set (COADS) of SST data, temperatures there were higher around the 1930's than now, and there is not much long term warming trend, except for the past few years.

This may lead to long term heating and warming cycles in the oceans that are the result of upwheling of cool water from deep within the oceans.

I asked Lee and McPhaden how a connection to greenhouse - driven warming could be made, given the possibility that the Pacific shift could be the result of long - term oscillations in conditions in the ocean unrelated to the buildup of heat - trapping greenhouse gases in the air.

My understanding (I hope I have got this right) is that colder oceans are vastly more productive in terms of plankton than warmer ones.

To clarify my above comment, I was suggesting that the observed rise in ocean heat content would be substantial with or without the La Nina effect, representing primarily the persistence of a long term warming trend.

The real problem here is that this AMO explanation was picked up and broadcast by the press in a very uncritical manner, usually in these terms: «Surface waters of the Atlantic ocean warm up then cool down in long, subtle cycles.

One of the really troubling long - term aspects of oceanic warming is the possibility of anoxic oceans, which have occurred in the deep past during «hothouse Earth» episodes.

Short - term variations in ocean heat uptake, such as the anomalous deep ocean warming of late, are due to changes in the vertical & horizontal distribution of heat in the ocean — mostly the wind - driven ocean circulation.