Researchers have warned that most of the world’s oceans continue to lose their “memory” year after year due to global warming. Deteriorating ocean memory has been found to be a collective response across climate models to human-caused warming. As greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, this memory decline will become more pronounced. The study published in the journal Science Advances compared rapid weather fluctuations in the atmosphere to find that slowly changing oceans exhibit strong persistence, or “memory,” meaning that tomorrow’s ocean temperatures will likely look very much like today. , with minor changes.
“We discovered this phenomenon by examining the similarity of sea surface temperatures over the years as a simple measure of ocean memory,” said Hui Shi, lead author and researcher at the Farallon Institute in Petaluma, California. The sea develops amnesia.”
Ocean memories have been found to be related to the thickness of the ocean’s top layer, known as the mixed layer. The deep mixed layer has a higher enthalpy, which provides more thermal inertia which translates to memory.
However, mixed layers in most oceans will become shallower in response to ongoing anthropogenic warming, lowering ocean memory.
In addition to reducing ocean memory, the thin mixed layer was also found to increase random fluctuations in sea surface temperature.
As a result, although the oceans will not become more turbulent year after year in the future, the share of signals useful for forecasting is significantly lower.
“Decreased ocean memory with increasing random fluctuations indicates fundamental changes in the system and new challenges in prediction under warming,” said Fei Fei Jin, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Hawaii.
Marine amnesia not only affects the prediction of physical variables, it can also influence the way we manage sensitive marine ecosystems.
In addition to oceanic forecasting, forecasting of terrestrial effects on temperature and precipitation and extreme events could also be affected by ocean memory decline due to its reliance on persistent sea surface temperature as a source of forecasts, the team said.
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