The Saturation Chronicles - 12

Fig. 1 Thus sayeth the facts

Today's appendices (APNDX 0-8, APNDX 9-16) each contain a projection back to 1900 from 1950 in situ measurements, and forward from 1950 to 2023.

They are constructed using actual in situ measurements converted into percentages as averages of all in situ measurements at up to 32 ocean depth levels.

Those data originate from  World Ocean Database (WOD), SOCCOM database, and Wood's Hole database files which are presented as layers 0-16 (Fig. 2).

Each layer is a latitude band of WOD zones (listed here) where measurements have been taken over the years.

The reason for the inquiry into "saturation" was prompted, among other things, by:

Fig. 2 World Ocean Data

"2024 saw unprecedented global temperatures, following on from the remarkable warmth of 2023. It also became the first year with an average temperature clearly exceeding 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level – a threshold set by the Paris Agreement to significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change. Multiple global records were broken, for greenhouse gas levels, and for both air temperature and sea surface temperature, contributing to extreme events, including floods, heatwaves and wildfires. These data highlight the accelerating impacts of human-caused climate change." 

(Global Climate Highlights 2024). The previous post in this series quoted a paper that declared "A doubling of Earth's energy imbalance"; the first post in this series detailed exactly how the saturation percent is calculated (The Saturation Chronicles); while other posts in this series pointed out that there is substantial uncertainty in the scientific community as to a or the cause of this heat acceleration (The Saturation Chronicles - 3, see video).

The gist of it is:

"The world has been getting hotter for decades but a sudden and extraordinary surge in heat has sent the climate deeper into uncharted territory – and scientists are still trying to figure out why.

Over the past two years, temperature records have been repeatedly shattered by a streak so persistent and puzzling it has tested the best-available scientific predictions about how the climate functions.

Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has largely driven long-term global warming, and that natural climate variability can also influence temperatures one year to the next.

But they are still debating what might have contributed to this particularly exceptional heat surge." 

(Even NASA Can't Explain The Alarming Surge in Global Heat). So, there is room for hypotheticals, eh?

Closing Comments

Note that some of the graphs show calculations where the percentage of saturation is less than zero.

This is an indication that the Conservative Temperature and Absolute Salinity values used to calculate potential enthalpy (ho) indicate that partial freezing (ice crystal formation, slushy frazil areas) has taken place such that the conditions require infrared photon absorption of that percentage prior to reaching a state of being able to emit infrared photons (radiation capacity) is reached at that location.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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About Gavin Schmidt.

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