The world’s ocean is steadily losing its year-to-year memory due to global warming, according to a study published in Science Advances co-authored by a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa atmospheric scientist.
The world’s ocean is steadily losing its year-to-year memory due to global warming, according to a study published in Science Advances co-authored by a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa atmospheric scientist. The research team discovered this by assessing future projections from the latest generation of Earth System Models.
Compared with the fast weather fluctuations of the atmosphere, the slowly varying ocean exhibits strong persistence, or “memory,” meaning the ocean temperature tomorrow is likely to look a lot like it does today, with only slight changes. As a result, ocean memory is often used for predicting ocean conditions.
Across the climate models, ocean memory decline was found as a collective response to human-induced warming. As greenhouse-gas concentrations continue to rise, such memory decline will become increasingly evident.
“We discovered this phenomenon by examining the similarity in ocean surface temperature from one year to the next as a simple metric for ocean memory,” said Hui Shi, lead author and researcher at the Farallon Institute in Petaluma, California. “It's almost as if the ocean is developing amnesia.”
Read more at University of Hawaii at Manoa
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