Ocean surfaces hit record warmth in 2014 Increasing carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere causes the planet to retain extra heat, but where that heat goes has proven to be complicated. Over the past decade we’ve begun to understand that there are many reservoirs that take up this extra heat. All of them have shown the effects of increasing warmth, but it has turned out that the patterns are quite surprising. The main reservoirs that can take extra heat, that we know about right now at least, include the atmosphere, the upper oceans, and the deep oceans, potentially as well as “melting ice” if it happens on a large enough scale. The ocean reservoirs are particularly huge. There is so much water in the oceans that even a small change in water temperature is an uptake of a huge amount of heat. Over the last 16 years, the atmospheric temperature has hit several record highs and it seems on course to do so again this year (http://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js1TsvMhq). Other recent work looking at sea levels has suggested that large amounts of heat have been stored in the deep oceans, enough to produce measureable changes in sea levels solely through thermal expansion (the property where almost all matter increases in volume as it gets hotter: http://bit.ly/1tl7Y6A). However, for the last 10+ years, satellites and direct temperature measurements didn’t see much of a change in sea surface temperatures. This fact has led some to describe the situation as a “pause” or something like that in the long-term trend of increasing temperatures. As of 2014, that is no longer the case. The surface portions of the oceans saw a big temperature increase in 2014, blowing past the sea surface temperatures observed in the monster 1998 El Nino event. This change therefore makes the world’s oceans in 2014 as hot as they have been since before humans on sailing ships started dipping temperature probes into the waters. This 2014 heating was mostly concentrated in the North Pacific Ocean, which suggests that it could have a link to the extreme weather events throughout the world. The warm Pacific waters are in areas that likely contributed to the growing drought in California, as well as changes in Pacific Ocean typhoon paths and intensity and even coral bleaching near the Hawaiian Islands. It’s hard to directly link local effects to climate change as the weather on any given day is a complicated function of a whole lot of variables, not just the global climate, but this temperature record being driven by the Pacific Ocean does suggest a connection between 2014’s weird weather and a warming world. -JBB Image credit: NOAA http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/82616.php?from=282303 Press release: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-11/uoh-woe111314.php