Sep 24, 2018
Recent Southern Ocean warming and freshening driven by greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion
by
,
Nature Geoscience
- States that the Southern Ocean has, on average, warmed and freshened over the past several decades, but the drivers of these changes are poorly understood
- Constructs an observational synthesis to quantify the temperature and salinity changes over the Southern Ocean and combine this with an ensemble of co-sampled climate model simulations
- Uses a detection and attribution analysis to show that the observed changes are inconsistent with the internal variability or the response to natural forcing alone
- Finds that:
- The observed changes are primarily attributable to human-induced greenhouse gas increases, with a secondary role for stratospheric ozone depletion
- Physically, the simulated changes are primarily driven by surface fluxes of heat and freshwater