Bad News for Trenberth’s Missing Heat – New Study Finds the Deep Oceans Cooled from 1992 to 2011 and…

Watts Up With That?

…that some of the warming nearer to the surface came from the deep ocean.

Guest Post by Bob Tisdale

The paper is Liang et al. (2015) Vertical Redistribution of Oceanic Heat Content.  The abstract reads (my boldface):

Estimated values of recent oceanic heat uptake are of order of a few tenths of a W/m², and are a very small residual of air-sea exchanges with annual average regional magnitudes of hundreds of W/m². Using a dynamically consistent state estimate, the redistribution of heat within the ocean is calculated over a 20-year period. The 20-year mean vertical heat flux shows strong variations in both the lateral and vertical directions, consistent with the ocean being a dynamically active and spatially complex heat exchanger. Between mixing and advection, the two processes determining the vertical heat transport in the deep ocean, advection plays a more important role in setting the…

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