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Gavin Schmidt: Ocean heat content revision (realclimate.org, June 19, 2008)

The post below was copied from the RealClimate.org blog of June 19, 2008. It was written by Gavin Schmidt.

Hot on the heels of last months reporting of a discrepancy in the ocean surface temperatures, a new paper in Nature (by Domingues et al, 2008) reports on the revisions of the ocean heat content (OHC) data -- a correction required because of other discrepancies in measuring systems found last year.

Before we get to the punchline though, it's worth going over the saga of the OHC trends in the literature over the last 8 years. In 2001, Syd Levitus and colleagues first published their collation of ocean heat content trends since 1950 based on archives of millions of profiles taken by oceanographic researchers over the last 50 years. This showed a long term upward trend up, but with some very significant decadal variability -- particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. This long term trend was in reasonable agreement with model predictions, but the decadal variability was much larger in the observations.

As in all cases where there is a data-model mismatch, people go back to both in order to see what might be wrong. One of the first suggestions was that since the spatial sampling became much coarser in the early part of the record, there might be more noise earlier on that didn't actually reflect a real ocean-wide signal. Sub-sampling the ocean models at the same sampling density as the real observations did increase the decadal variability in the diagnostic but it didn't provide a significantly better match (AchutaRao et al, 2006).

Other problems came up when trying to tally the reasons for sea level rise (SLR) over that 50 year period. Global SLR is a product of (in rough order of importance) ocean warming, land ice melting, groundwater extraction/dam building, and remnant glacial isostatic adjustment (the ocean basins are still slowly adjusting to the end of the last ice age). The numbers from tide gauges (and later, satellites) were higher than what you got by estimating each of those terms separately. (Note that the difference is mainly due to the early part of the record -- more recent trends do fit pretty well). There were enough uncertainties in the various components so that it wasn't obvious where the problems were though.

[For the rest of this post by Gavin Schmidt, please go to the realclimate.org link provided below.]

Link: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/ocean-heat-content-revisions/