Diving deep into ocean data uncovers ‘missing heat’ treasure

A new ocean reanalysis called ORAS4, here showing the difference between September 2012 sea temperatures and the average for 1989-2009 (not part of the latest study), has helped show that extra heat trapped in the atmosphere by CO2 humans are emitting is buried in the deep ocean. Credit: ECMWF

A newly-made picture of ocean history has backed a theory that the missing piece of a climate puzzle at the edge of space lies deep in Earth’s waters. The puzzle comes because the amount of heat energy our planet has absorbed should have warmed it more than it seems to have done. But now, using an ocean reanalysis assembled from data gathered from many sources, UK and US researchers have shown especially strong recent warming in oceans below 700m. “We have found some energy buried at depths,” Kevin Trenberth from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. “We also have a plausible explanation for it related to changes in winds.”

In 2010, Kevin went public over his worries about a budget that didn’t balance. But rather than money, that budget tallies heat energy from the Sun entering the top of the atmosphere against energy the Earth radiates back out into space. Satellite measurements show more energy coming in than leaving, which is what causes global warming. But Kevin noticed that existing measurements showed the world hadn’t warmed as much since 2003 as this budget would suggest.

With over nine-tenths of the surplus energy coming into the Earth going into the sea, the deep ocean has always looked the likeliest hiding place for the missing heat. However, temperature data from those depths is scarce, making the theory hard to prove. Yet, in the years since Kevin pointed out the problem, scientists have gathered some clues to back that explanation. For example, some used a model that includes the complex links between the atmosphere, land, oceans, and sea ice to run five simulations of the 21^st century. They found warming slowdowns on the Earth’s surface similar to what has happened in the 2000s, with the heat going into the deep oceans. But even this just underlined the importance of using measurements to see the effect directly.

Climate change set to bring Western Europe more hurricanes

In January 2009 a cyclone called Klaus, which is shown here and boasted hurricane-force winds, hit France, Spain and Italy. Such conditions could become much more common in Europe by the end of the 21st century, according to Rein Haarsma and his KNMI team. Credit: H de C via Flickr Creative Commons license

Current once-in-a-century hurricane-force winds may become as much as 25 times as likely in parts of Western Europe at the end of the 21^st century. That’s what Rein Haarsma and a team from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) have shown using one of the highest-resolution climate models around today. Their findings spring from a change in where hurricanes will develop that could also affect western North America, though more research is needed to study this. “The statement that the wind climate in Western Europe will not change significantly is questionable,” Rein told me. “Significant changes in wind climate will have consequences for agriculture – the increased winds are during the autumn – infrastructure and coastal defence.”

With Europe so far from the tropical regions where warmth and unstable atmosphere spawns hurricanes, it rarely sees them today. But when hurricane conditions do happen, like the ‘Great Storm’ in 1987, or Hurricane Floyd in 1993, they live long in the memory. The hurricane remnants that sometimes reach Western Europe usually bring a lot of rain, Rein noted, and only occasionally hurricane-force winds.

The warming Arctic is reducing ocean temperature differences that help create Europe’s traditional storms, meaning they pose less of a threat. But recently findings have shown that a warmer atmosphere raises hurricane risks. “Many model simulations suggest that the strength of hurricanes will increase due to climate change,” Rein explains. “The area where hurricanes develop appears to move poleward and the moisture content in a warmer atmosphere will increase. These factors might alter the possibility that these remnants of hurricanes are still strong enough to produce hurricane-force winds.”

Altered pressure patterns bring Eurasia intense iciness

People enjoying the winter sun – typical of an anticyclone, or high pressure, weather system – on the frozen Landwehrkanal in Berlin-Kreuzberg, during February 2012, when Berlin set a record for extreme cold. Credit: onnola via Flickr

Extreme cold that has left Europe and Asia snowbound, shivering and asking, “What global warming?” in recent years has been driven by intensified high pressure patterns. That’s according to Xiangdong Zhang at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who has been studying how such cold snaps fit in with increasing average temperatures worldwide. “Extreme cold weather events can occur in a particular region and short time period in a warming global climate,” Xiangdong pointed out. “This may highly disrupt daily life, damage infrastructure, and impact ecosystems and environment.”

Xiangdong started thinking about extreme cold events because climate studies usually use monthly temperature averages, which overlook them. “This cannot reflect extreme cold temperatures occurring on a particular day because daily temperature changes are filtered out by the average,” he told me. “For example, the monthly averaged temperature in February 2012 was -4.9°C in Berlin. But the coldest daily temperature in the same month at the same location was -19.6°C. We don’t directly feel the monthly average temperature in our daily life. What we feel is day-by-day changes in temperature. But if we can understand mechanisms of daily temperature changes, we would be able to better understand why there is colder or warmer monthly average temperature.”

Outside of tropical areas weather patterns known as cyclones, which would be called low pressure on a weather forecast, and anticyclones, or high pressure, drive those daily temperature changes. Xiangdong had previously been part of a team that adapted an automated cyclone spotting method to look at each one separately. Last year, with researchers from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in China, he used that method to study records from across Europe and Asia between 1978-2012. They brought together sea level pressure data recorded every six hours by a global collection network, and daily minimum air temperatures recorded at 1337 meteorological stations.

Can we trust climate models?

Scientists use models like the Community Climate System Model (CCSM, shown here) to increase their understanding of the world’s climate patterns and learn how they may affect regions around the globe. Credit: PNNL

Computers crash, freeze, corrupt documents, and otherwise make us swear at them every day. At such moments I briefly blow my own fuse, and my computer becomes my enemy – until I remember it’s revolutionised how I work, communicate and access information. But knowing how easily they can go wrong – and how easily a small, overlooked, mistake in a piece of software can cause unexpected problems later – makes me cautious. That extends to writing this blog, when I often wonder just how much we can rely on the computer models used so widely by scientists studying global warming. So this year I’ve been asking researchers questions like: Why even use models? How can we trust that they’re accurate? How should we understand what they come up with?

These questions go deep into how science works, using evidence from what people see, or experiments we conduct, to build or knock down ideas. The best evidence is directly measured, in as much detail as possible. Today that’s available in some cases, but not all, and we can’t go back in time to get data over the long time periods that might be ideal. For example, this previously limited our understanding of global warming’s effect on tropical cyclones, Bruno Chatenoux from the Global Change and Vulnerability Unit at the United Nations Environment Program in Geneva, Switzerland told me in February. “Formal detection of trends in the existing records is challenged by data quality issues and record length,” he told me. “Model projections suffer less from this, but have other challenges, such as whether they are accurately representing all of the relevant physical processes.”

And while there are a lot of processes to represent, researchers have worked hard to establish them, underlined Xuefeng Cui from Beijing Normal University, China, in July. “Climate models have been developed by groups of scientists to include atmosphere, oceanography, land, biology, chemistry, physics, computing science for about 40 years,” he said. “They have a solid scientific foundation and model the climate system in reasonable resolution.”

CO2 casts off shackles to power up Atlantic hurricanes

NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite captured this visible image of Hurricane Sandy battering the U.S. East coast on Monday, Oct. 29 at 9:10 am EDT. Sandy’s center was about 310 miles south-southeast of New York City. Tropical Storm force winds are about 1,000 miles in diameter, and are set to intensify in the 21st century. Credit: NASA GOES Project

Changes in greenhouse gases and other air pollution will likely make Atlantic storms that could hit the Caribbean and Eastern US more intense through this century. That’s according to research from Gabriel Vecchi at the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Princeton, New Jersey, and Gabriele Villarini at the University of Iowa. They’ve found that more greenhouse gases strengthen these storms but other pollutants known as aerosols or particulates, which include soot, do the opposite. Increases in both types of pollution through the 20^th century therefore cancelled each other out. But with more recent efforts to limit aerosol pollution succeeding, Atlantic storms now look set to become more destructive. “Both reductions in particulate pollution and increases in greenhouse gases are going to co-operate, we think, to give us more intense hurricanes in the Atlantic,” Gabriel said.

Gabriel has long studied Atlantic storms, and together with Gabriele recently found that how often they happen will likely only increase during the first half of the 21^st century. “The number of storms in a season is only part of the story,” Gabriel told me. “A big question for society is the intensity.” So it was natural, he added, to follow on by looking at how strong and long-lasting they are. Scientists have already looked at their intensity for narrow “time-slices”, for example from 1985-2005 and then predicting from 2080 to 2100. “People haven’t explored how we go from the late 20^th century to the late 21^st century,” Gabriel said.” That’s because to do this research they need complex and very detailed ‘high resolution dynamical’ climate models, which use up scarce time on the world’s most powerful computers. For the same reason, previous studies only look at a few possible scenarios for how much of the greenhouse gas CO2 humans will produce by burning fossil fuels.

Monsoon instability raises food questions for India

A street in Calcutta floods during monsoon season. After some decades of increasing rainfall, climate change could bring drier monsoons, said Jacob Schewe from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Credit: Mark E Dyer/Flickr

Monsoon rains in India may fail more frequently as climate change proceeds into the 22^nd century, German researchers said this week. That danger could be critical for farming in what is set to become the world’s most highly populated country by 2030, and would follow an already expected wetter period. “Previous studies showed that Indian monsoon rainfall would increase more or less linearly with global warming over the next century,” said Jacob Schewe from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The monsoon can respond to climate change in a more complicated way. We’ve seen that it matters to look further into the future.”

In South Asia, summer monsoon rains fall as winds blow from the southwest Indian Ocean over the continent between June and September. They end when the wind direction reverses in September or October. What Indian monsoon rain seasons will do as the world warms is an important and difficult question that many researchers are trying to answer. Though more rainfall has been predicted, recent years haven’t matched that expectation. While factors like pollution have an effect, changes climate scientists already know a major climate pattern plays a very important part in monsoons.

“There is a coupling between the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the monsoon that’s been observed for a long time,” Jacob told me. In years when El Niño occurs, an air movement pattern called the Walker circulation pattern gets shifted eastward. That brings high pressure over India and weakens the monsoon. While some changes in El Niño are already happening, the Walker circulation is expected to weaken, but not for some time yet. That could mean scientists’ climate models don’t pick up its effects. “People have looked at monsoon changes but not many studies have looked beyond 2100,” Jacob said. “You really have to consider longer timescales – beyond 2100 – to assess the full range of consequences for the monsoon.”

Climate change brings landscapes to their last days

Like icebergs, much of the mass of Arctic ice lies under the surface, making studying its thickness important, as well as the area it covers. Thick, multiyear Arctic sea ice is disappearing, giving way to thin, young ice, according to University of Colorado at Boulder scientists. Credit: James Maslanik, University of Colorado

Nature’s beauty means different things to each of us – but undoubtedly it burns some images onto our souls. Our favourite scenery is less constant than we sometimes suppose,  changing from day to day and season to season. But the slowest changes can be the most heartbreaking, eventually robbing us of our favourite landscapes.

Some destructive changes you might consider man-made,  for example city sprawl overflowing, and some natural, such as coastal erosion. Landscape losses brought by global warming are a curious mixture of these two – humanity somehow pushing nature into a more savage mood.

In the two and a half years since I started this blog, I’ve often reported on science’s efforts to monitor how climate change is affecting landscapes in different parts of the world.  In this week’s blog entry I’ve decided to bring together pictures indicating what their work has told us – you can click on the pictures to read the original blog posts.

With the Arctic changing most rapidly as the world warms, it’s one of the most studied areas, and so its striking environment features highly. But if you look enough at your favourite landscapes, and at when its more regular changes happen, it’s likely you’ll already be able to see the signs of a slow and potentially troublesome revolution in progress.

Weather watching hits home with powerful warming warning

UK and Japanese scientists compared climate models to show that greenhouse gas emissions affected flooding in the UK, finding that they “substantially increased the odds of these floods occurring in 2000, with a likely increase of about a doubling or more”. Credit: Met Office

Pictures of people forced from their homes by floods, storms, drought-driven famines or fires are among the most dramatic displays of weather and climate’s power that we see.  Just as the world has steadily warmed in recent decades, these “extreme weather events” have also changed. For example, evidence suggests substantial increases in intensity and duration of tropical storms and hurricanes since the 1970s.  Extreme weather events happen all over the world, and the possibility that they will be more likely to hit our homes perhaps should be the best motivation to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Since Simple Climate started, I’ve regularly featured extreme weather and its links to man-made climate change. Those links are usually put carefully. Scientists typically can only say whether the greenhouse gases we’ve added to the atmosphere have raised the chances of events happening, or whether they will increase the chances they’ll happen in future.  But recently, they’ve been using powerful computer systems to look at whether specific events have been made more likely by climate change in “attribution studies”.  This week, I’ve brought together a few pictures of events that have been included in such attribution studies, and other research that I’ve covered.  I’ve also included images of how climate is affecting people in different parts of the world. Click on the pictures to read the original blog posts.

Warming brings more frequent and fickle European heatwaves

Heatwaves prompt creative ways to stay cool, as these children in Paris showed during the 2003 heatwave, and can lead to deadly consequences if people don’t stay cool enough, especially amongst the elderly. Credit: Christophe Becker/Flickr

Our changing climate will make future European summer heatwaves like the one in 2003, blamed for killing 35,000, more likely but harder to forecast a season in advance. That’s what research done by Benjamin Quesada from the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE) in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, suggests. Together with fellow climatologists, he has found that water trapped in Southern European soil during wet winters and springs keeps the continent reliably cool in summer. “Under global warming, climate models almost all agree about drier soils in Southern Europe and more frequent and long lasting summer heatwaves,” Benjamin told Simple Climate. Losing that cooling influence currently makes the weather less predictable but with a higher chance of being hot – though Benjamin hopes his findings will eventually bring more accurate forecasts.

The dramatic heatwaves in 2003 and 2010 took Europe by surprise. That has motivated the continent’s scientists to try to understand them and therefore predict them better. The role that water absorbed in soil plays has been one area that they’ve looked at. Their research shows a vicious “feedback” cycle where drier soils mean that less water reaches the atmosphere to create clouds. In turn, more heat from the sun reaches the ground and dries it out yet more. “Soil moisture can be seen as a buffer,” Benjamin said. “On dry soil, solar energy will directly heat soil, and isn’t ‘wasted’ first in evaporation as in wet soil.” Usually an escape from this cycle can come thanks to factors like winds circling the planet and carrying clouds with them, he added.

Global view answers ice age CO2 puzzle

Paleoclimate researcher Jeremy Shakun. Credit: Harvard University

Previous data suggesting that the world started warming out of the last ice age before CO2 levels in the atmosphere started rising don’t show the full picture. That’s according to US, French and Chinese scientists who have added to those Antarctic measurements with more taken from 80 locations across the globe. Harvard University’s Jeremy Shakun and colleagues show the greenhouse gas rises before temperature, supporting the case that CO2 drove climate change then, as it is now. “This provides a very tangible example of what rising CO2 can mean for the climate over the long term,” Jeremy said.

In the 1980s, researchers began building the history of CO2 in the atmosphere from cylinders of ice drilled from the Antarctic. Bubbles in the ice contain air from the time they formed, which researchers can measure. They can also figure out how old the ice holding the bubbles is from how deep it is in the core. And finally they can also work out temperature from the amount of the different forms, known as isotopes, of elements like hydrogen, carbon and oxygen in the ice. That’s because the temperature at which the snow that eventually became the ice formed affects how much of each it contains. And because some isotopes are radioactive and decay to a more stable isotope with time, studying them gives scientists another way to check the ice’s age.

The 800,000 year record of atmospheric CO2 from Antarctic ice cores, and a reconstruction of temperature based on hydrogen isotopes in the ice. The current CO2 concentration of 392 parts per million (ppm) is shown by the blue star. Credit: Jeremy Shakun/Harvard University

Such methods show temperature and CO2 levels rising and falling together for 800,000 years, Jeremy told journalists over the phone on Tuesday. “The question is: Which is the cause and which is the effect?” he asked. “If you look up close you see temperature changed before CO2 did. This is something the global warming skeptics have jumped on to say, ‘Obviously CO2 doesn’t cause warming because it came after the warming in these records’. But these ice cores only tell you about temperatures in Antarctica. For the same reason that you don’t look at just one thermometer from London or New York to prove or disprove global warming, you don’t want to look at just one spot in the map to reconstruct the past either.”