A REVISED ESTIMATE OF UPPER OCEAN HEAT CONTENT AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE GLOBAL ENERGY BALANCE

摘要

The oceans absorb the vast majority of any net radiativernimbalance in the global climate system, such as the onerncaused by the addition of anthropogenic greenhouserngases to the atmosphere. Past estimates of ocean heatrncontent increase have suffered from biases in one of thernmost abundant sources of ocean temperature data, therneXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT). RemainingrnXBT biases still account for significant discrepanciesrnbetween different estimates of ocean heat content onrninterannual time scales. Data from multiple sourcesrnwere used to assess the global energy imbalance and tornassess the amount of remaining error in ocean heatrncontent estimates due to XBT biases. In addition, thernoverall consistency between different approachesrnsuggests a global radiative imbalance of between 0.3rnand 0.6 W/m~2 from 2005 to the present.