2021’s world ocean was the hottest ever recorded, beating out even last year’s record high temperatures, finds Alexey Mishonov, Jim Reagan, and a team of international scholars.
CISESS Scientists Alexey Mishonov and Jim Reagan are co-authors on a new article titled “Upper Ocean Temperatures Hit Record High in 2020” published in the April 2021 issue of Advances in Atmospheric Science.
Since the industrial revolution, the emission of greenhouse gasses by human activities has been mainly responsible for global warming. This increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has caused an energy imbalance in the Earth’s climate system, with the world’s oceans absorbing 90% of this excess heat. This has led to an increase in ocean heat content (OHC) and sea level rise. In 2000, Levitus et al. developed the first global OHC time series, identifying a robust long-term ocean warming from 1948-98. Since then, many other analyses of global and regional OHC data have been performed.
