Ocean Heating => Sea Level Sink Ocean Cooling => Sea Level Rise ...Or... Vice Versa ?
Joannes Sevenhans
Alcatel Academy Distinguished Member_2001 ...IEEE_Fellow_2000 for contributions to the design of solid state telecommunication transceivers ...PhD 1984 KULeuven ...Semi-retired ...Always looking for a next project ...
Difficult question ...
Water volume expands as well for heating above +5°C as for cooling below +5°C ...
Only the bleu ocean above is at about +5°C.
Most of world oceans are well above +5°C so ocean heating should result in sea level sink or rise ?
But sea level is measured to be rising so is ocean warming or cooling ?
According to "UAH", ocean temperature can get a hick up sometimes but remains relatively stable.
According to "Smeed et al., 2018", North Atlantic Ocean is cooling.
Anyway ...
In climate science there are too many unanswered questions and too many unquestioned answers ...
But : Health & Climate & Energy are really very complicated and delicate politico-scientific stuff and also socio-economic stuff but we do the best we can and try to explain it as simple as possible but not simpler than that in the group :
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1 年Thanks. Please clarify that water's maximum density is at 3.98 deg C
What about ice that is captured on land? Greenland, Antarctica, glaciers,…. The ice melting there will go straight back to the oceans and will definitely make the level rise.
Senior Partner at Mountain Ash Collective
1 年It does not take much of a T increase to expand the volume of water, because there is so much of it. However the pressure increase down is so severe that the preferred state is at its max density. Hence most of the ocean waters are at around 4C, salinity dependent. The Argo Floats measure T to about 2500 m, everything below is not known sufficiently to report any change. The second question is if the wide spacing of the Argo Floats can separate precision from accuracy, the T has to be averaged over a large area. The measured changes by Argo are in the small decimals..Yet the hypothesis is valid, but so is crustal movement and basin accommodation, which is the leading hypothesis for the countless transgressions and regressions in the geologic record.