Zzedzz, given your vast knowledge of everything, i thought you’d only be too interested in this article in the February 2020 edition of the journal Advances In Atmospheric Sciences by a combined team from China and America. I’m sure it will help to fill in some of the many gaps.
the key takeout from the article is that the world’s oceans especially in the top 2000 meters “in 2019 were the warmest in recorded human history.”
the Title of the article is “Record-Setting Ocean Warmth Continued In 2019.”
”Human-emitted greenhouse gases (GHGs) have resulted in a long-term and unequivocal warming of the planet (IPCC, 2019).
“More than 90% of the excess heat is stored within the world’s oceans, where it accumulates and causes increases in ocean temperature (Rhein et al., 2013; Abram et al., 2019).
“Because the oceans are the main repository of the Earth’s energy imbalance, measuring ocean heat content (OHC) is one of the best way to quantify the rate of global warming (Trenberth et al., 2016; Von Schuckmann et al., 2016; Cheng et al., 2018).
“Following reports released in the previous two years (Cheng and Zhu, 2018; Cheng et al., 2019c), this article presents new OHC data for the year 2019.
“These data reveal that the world’s oceans (especially at upper 2000 m) in 2019 were the warmest in recorded human history. Specifically, the ocean heat anomaly (0−2000 m) in 2019 was 228 Zetta Joules (ZJ, 1 ZJ=1021 Joules) above the 1981−2010 average and 25 ZJ above 2018 (Table 1).
”The OHC values (for the upper 2000 m) were obtained from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) ocean analysis (see “Data and methods” section, below), which uses a relatively new method to treat data sparseness and updates in the in- struments that have been used to measure ocean temperature (Cheng et al., 2017).
“The evolution of OHC (Fig. 1) shows that the upper 2000 m OHC in 2019 was 228 ± 9 ZJ above the 1981–2010 average.
“The record-setting ocean warmth is also found in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Center for Environmental Information (NOAA/NCEI) data, showing 217± 4 ZJ in 2019 above 1981−2010 average (21 ZJ above 2018) (Table 1) (updated from Levitus et al. 2012).
“With these newly available IAP data, a ranking of the warmest years since 1950s is now possible (Ta- ble 1). The past five years are the top five warmest years in the ocean historically with modern instruments, and the past ten years are also the top ten years on record. The same ranking also applies to NOAA/NCEI data (Table 1).”
