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Temperature: Ocean Warming

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Temperature: Ocean Warming

The oceans have absorbed over 90% of the excess heat resulting from greenhouse gas emissions since the 1970s. So if it weren’t for the ocean, the land would be a lot hotter than it is today. Since water absorbs a lot of heat, the ocean’s temperature has not increased as fast as the land’s though, but there have been some alarming trends in the last year or so (2023-2024).

Daily Global Sea Surface Temperature records from 1981-2024 showing the significant increases in the last two years.   Source: Climate Reanalyzer, Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, based on data from NOAA Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST). Climate Reanalyzer content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Annual Global Sea Surface Temperature anomaly relative to the 1951-2000 time interval.  Source: Climate Reanalyzer, Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, based on data from NOAA Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST). Climate Reanalyzer content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The instrumental record of temperature change in the oceans goes back to about 1850 and consists of thermometer measurements made on water samples taken by merchant and navy ships as they sailed the world’s oceans. The data are understandably best for parts of the oceans along major trade routes, and they are less abundant further back in time. These measurements, just like the land-based weather station data, have to be gridded to come up with a global average sea surface temperature. As might be expected, the sea surface temperature record is similar to the global temperature records, in part because the oceans make up almost 75% of Earth’s surface. But even if we separate out the land surface temperature from the global record and compare it to the ocean surface temperature, they are quite similar, as seen in the figure below.

Graph of sea surface temp and land surface temp. fairly similar trends. both increase. sea temp increases less than land temp after ~1980
Global Anomalies relative by decade relative to 1961-1990 Sea Surface Temperature (blue curve) compared to Land Surface Temperature (green curve)
Credit: Timothy Bralower © Penn State University is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Although the two records are quite similar, there are some differences — the SST changes over a smaller range than the land surface temperature, and the land temperature is subject to more dramatic swings. This difference is largely due to the greater heat capacity of the oceans relative to the air — it takes a long time to heat and cool the oceans, but air temperature can change quite rapidly.

Measurements from a system of hundreds of buoys stationed throughout the oceans allow us to take the temperature of the oceans over a depth range of 2000 m. These measurements go back in time to 1955 and show that not just the surface of the oceans, but the whole upper half of the oceans are slowly warming — only about 0.1 to 0.2 °C averaged over the globe during the past 50 years — but this is a vast amount of water that has been warmed.

So, while the whole ocean has absorbed a huge amount of heat, its overall temperature has changed little. Nevertheless, the very surface of the ocean has warmed almost as much as the rest of Earth’s surface and from the middle of 2023 through to 2024 the surface warming has been quite alarming with temperatures almost a degree warmer than in 2016.