The role of the oceans in changes of the Earth's climate system
Abstract
Any changes to the Earth's climate system affect an imbalance of the Earth's energy budget due to natural or human made climate forcing. The current positive Earth's energy imbalance is mostly caused by human activity, and is driving global warming. Variations in the world's ocean heat storage and its associated volume changes are a key factor to gauge global warming, to assess changes in the Earth's energy budget and to estimate contributions to the global sea level budget. Present-day sea-level rise is one of the major symptoms of the current positive Earth Energy Imbalance. Sea level also responds to natural climate variability that is superimposing and altering the global warming signal. The most prominent signature in the global mean sea level interannual variability is caused by El Niño-Southern Oscillation. It has been also shown that sea level variability in other regions of the Indo-Pacific area significantly alters estimates of the rate of sea level rise, i.e. in the Indonesian archipelago. In summary, improving the accuracy of our estimates of global Earth's climate state and variability is critical for advancing the understanding and prediction of the evolution of our climate, and an overview on recent findings on the role of the global ocean in changes of the Earth's climate system with particular focus on sea level variability in the Indo-Pacific region will be given in this contribution.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMOS11B..07V
- Keywords:
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- 4215 Climate and interannual variability;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERALDE: 4522 ENSO;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICALDE: 4532 General circulation;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICALDE: 4556 Sea level: variations and mean;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL