This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The world's oceans behave like a thermometer: As the water warms, it expands and sea levels rise. Geodesy researchers at the University of Bonn are able to measure this and determine how much the oceans are warming.
For individual ocean basins, their method has revealed significant deviations from model calculations—in some cases in the double-digit percentage range. The research is published in the journal Earth System Science Data, and they explain their findings below. Earth is currently absorbing more heat than it radiates into space.
About 90% of this additional heat is absorbed by the oceans. Among other things, this influences sea level, marine heat waves and weather phenomena such as El Niño. Until now, freely drifting submersible buoys have been used to measure how heat is distributed in the ocean, but their coverage and sampling of the ocean are incomplete.
Our approach combines measurements from buoys with sea level data from satellites. From these data, we can reconstruct monthly maps and determine the warming of the entire ocean. This allows us to better determine how much heat the ocean absorbs and redistributes.
Our method directly determines the total warming, averaged across all ocean depths. From this, global warming values can then be calculated. When considered across all oceans, our results are largely consistent with climate models.
However, for individual ocean basins, there are significant differences from the model simulations, in the double-digit percentage range. The Indian Ocean, in particular, absorbed an unusually large amount of heat from 2005 to 2015. Over the past 20 years, the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans have each absorbed about one-third of the additional heat.
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