Publication Date:
2022-12-23
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2022. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 49(12), (2022): e2021GL097598, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL097598.
Description:
The ocean is inhomogeneous in hydrographic properties with diverse water masses. Yet, how this inhomogeneity has evolved in a rapidly changing climate has not been investigated. Using multiple observational and reanalysis datasets, we show that the spatial standard deviation (SSD) of the global ocean has increased by 1.4 ± 0.1% in temperature and 1.5 ± 0.1% in salinity since 1960. A newly defined thermohaline inhomogeneity index, a holistic measure of both temperature and salinity changes, has increased by 2.4 ± 0.1%. Climate model simulations suggest that the observed ocean inhomogeneity increase is dominated by anthropogenic forcing and projected to accelerate by 200%–300% during 2015–2100. Geographically, the rapid upper-ocean warming at mid-to-low latitudes dominates the temperature inhomogeneity increase, while the increasing salinity inhomogeneity is mainly due to the amplified salinity contrast between the subtropical and subpolar latitudes.
Description:
This work is supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant XDB42000000 and XDB40000000), the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFA0603200), and the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (ZR2020JQ17), and the U.S. National Science Foundation Physical Oceanography Program (OCE- 2048336).
Description:
2022-12-23
Keywords:
Global ocean
;
Temperature
;
Salinity
;
Spatial inhomogeneity
;
Climate change
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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