Ocean temperatures are so high NOAA had to make new charts

http://www.businessinsider.com/ocean-temperatures-are-so-high-noaa-had-to-make-new-charts-2015-1

Erica K. Landau
Jan. 30, 2015

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had to redesign a graph of ocean heat content last week because data collected by the agency went off the charts.

The graph's upper bound was raised 25 percent in order to plot the rise in the amount of energy stored in the oceans, an event triggered by increasing amounts of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions.

It's not the first time the agency was forced to revise the size of its graphs.

NOAA has amended charts three other times, including once for sea level rise, since they began posting them in 2008.

"The ocean is in a state that has never previously been observed," Amy Clement, Associate Dean and Professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, told VICE News. "We're in unchartered waters."

According to research published by NOAA scientists in 2012, the spike in ocean heat content from 1955 to 2012 was around 24 x 10^22 Joules.

That's 2,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules.




For perspective, if that amount of heat were transferred to the lower six miles of the atmosphere, temperatures would rise about 36 degrees Celsius (65 Fahrenheit).

The importance of the updated NOAA data, however, is less in the fact that the agency had to adjust its charts. Instead, say scientists, the new high temperature illustrates the dramatic warming of the oceans, which is frequently overlooked, with much greater attention being paid to atmospheric temperature increase.

Oceans can absorb about 1,000 times more heat than the atmosphere. At least 90 percent of extra heat trapped by human-generated greenhouse gases can be found in the world's oceans.

According to Clement, that makes NOAA's ocean heat content graph, which tracks warming from the surface down to a depth of 2000 meters (6562 feet), "the best measure" of the extent of global warming.

"It takes a lot more energy to heat water than to heat air," Jennifer Francis a climate scientist at Rutgers University, told VICE News. "The steady upward climb of deep ocean temperature is staggering. And nothing other than increased greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels can explain it."

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Even with record levels of ocean heat content, though, there still might be a slight underestimating of ocean warming because the estimates neglect input below 2000 meters, Leslie said.

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"Right now the warming is happening between 10 and 100 times faster than at any other time in the past 800,000 years," Chris Langdon, a marine biology and ecology professor at the University of Miami, told VICE News.

That spells big trouble for sea life, he said.

"Each year the oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic and that's stressful for many forms of marine organisms. The rates of change now are so fast they may not have time to evolve.

"We won't be certain until it's a little too late to do something about it," Langdon added.

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