Scientists from the Department of Physics at Oxford University have discovered that the influence of circulation changes on shaping ocean warming will diminish in the future. This is despite having been identified and modelled as a key factor over the past 60 years. The implications of their results, published today in Nature, are significant because regional sea level, affecting coastal populations around the world, depends on patterns of ocean warming. In this study they show how these patterns are likely to change.
The results imply widespread ocean warming and sea level rise, compared to the past, including increased warming near the Eastern edges of ocean basins leading to more sea level rise along the Western coastlines of continents in the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. A new method, developed by scientists at Oxford University, uses climate models to suggest that ocean warming patterns will increasingly be influenced by simple uptake of atmospheric warming – making them easier to predict. This is in contrast to now and the past when circulation changes were key factors in shaping ocean warming patterns.
The Nature study shows that the global ocean heat and carbon uptake go hand-in-hand, and the uptake rates are set by the present state of the ocean. This relationship is at the core of the method developed in this study. As humans change the ocean state by adding more heat and carbon, the ability of the ocean to take up both heat and carbon will be altered. A possible implication could be that the later emissions are reduced, the slower the reductions in atmospheric surface temperature are likely to be, due to the coupling between heat and carbon uptake by the ocean. These results highlight a deep and fundamental connection between ocean and carbon uptake, which has implications for atmospheric heat and carbon. While ocean carbon and heat are separate systems, this study shows that they are deeply interconnected, via the capacity of the ocean to absorb these quantities. These results help explain why atmospheric warming depends linearly on cumulative carbon emissions.
Source: Water Active
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