Tiago Fioreze / wikimedia
The Ocean’s memory is related to the persistence of oceanic conditions is greater than previously thought. New study helps predict the climate system.
In one published in October in the magazine Geophysical Research Letters, a team from the University of Liverpool managed to quantify the memory of the oceans, tracking the evolution of their temperatures in response to a single extreme atmospheric event.
This was the first study that actually quantified the memory of the oceans, which until now was thought to be between 8 and 10 years. After all, the North Atlantic Ocean, where the study was carried out, remembers more than we believed: between 10 and 20 years.
According to , the difficulty in identifying the memory of the oceans is due to the fact that the continuous changes in atmospheric forces hide the long-term effects of ocean circulation.
Hemant Khatrimain author of the study, guarantees that it “addresses a fundamental question: what the memory of the oceans truly is. New ocean memory framework reveals physical mechanisms responsible for multi-year ocean memory and paves the way for new methods for evaluating climate models“.
Now, the study authors attribute the great memory capacity of the North Atlantic Ocean to slow pace of changes in ocean circulation and heat transport.
Furthermore, fluctuations in ocean temperatures exert a significant influence on regional climateslike air temperatures, over more than a decade.
“This significant discrepancy in ocean memory could have substantial implications for the accuracy of these models’ decade-by-decade climate predictions,” he says. Ric Williams, co-author of the article.
“Our work shows how the ocean affects our climate and how understanding ocean temperature changes leads to greater competence over the next decade when it comes to climate projections“, he further comments.
