The oceans play an important role in regulating our climate and its change by absorbing heat and carbon.
The oceans play an important role in regulating our climate and its change by absorbing heat and carbon. 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.
Co-author, Laure Zanna, Visiting Professor in Climate Physics at Oxford University and Professor in the Center of Atmosphere Ocean Science at NYU Courant, said: ‘In the future, the imprint of rising atmospheric temperatures on ocean warming will likely dominate that of changes in ocean circulation. Initially, we might think that as the climate warms more, changes in ocean currents and their impact on ocean warming patterns will become larger. However, we show that that this is not the case in several regions of the ocean.’
Read more at University of Oxford
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