«There is no doubt that
warming tropical ocean temperatures over the last 50 years is mostly caused by human activity,» said Osterberg, «a really interesting question is when you go back over hundreds of years, how much of that is anthropogenic?»
There are a variety of factors that are known to make for quiet Atlantic hurricane seasons — particularly the occurrence of El Nino conditions (as occurred in 2002) in the Pacific Ocean, characterized by
very warm tropical ocean waters.
On the far right hand side, the heat content
of warm tropical ocean waters, 130 x 1021J (assuming a 100 m deep layer and 3 °C), approximately 20 times more than the energy stored in our remaining oil reserves!
Really wished baby Elsa was here to play with baby Maria in
the warm tropical ocean.
Paleoclimate data point to
a warm tropical ocean with a clear east - west temperature gradient during the warm climates of the Pliocene and Miocene.
Hurricanes, the largest and most damaging weather events, peak in late autumn, when winds coming off the coast of West Africa meet thunderstorms clustered over
the warm tropical ocean.
«A golden beach,
warm tropical ocean and almost total privacy from the rest of the world.
That's enough heat to
warm the tropical oceans to the point where Sue and I watched with our colleagues in the South Pacific as a wave of record - breaking warm water swept across the region this past spring, killing in a matter of weeks vast swaths of coral that had been there since before the beginning of the human experiment.
Furthermore, the surface temperatures of
the warmest tropical oceans seldom exceed 30C and for millions of years the underlying cold sub-surface waters have provided a powerful thermal buffer to warming.
The clouds increase albedo, but the clouds also block IR loss from
the warm tropical ocean currents as they move into the polar oceans.
This is because hurricanes get their energy from the temperature difference between
the warm tropical ocean and the cold upper atmosphere.