Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 110, Issue 38, Pages 15207-15210Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1306753110
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Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program [NNX10AP30H]
- National Science Foundation [OCE-0928395]
- Flagship Project RITMARE
- Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research within the National Research Program
- Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES)
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Tropical cyclones have been hypothesized to influence climate by pumping heat into the ocean, but a direct measure of this warming effect is still lacking. We quantified cyclone-induced ocean warming by directly monitoring the thermal expansion of water in the wake of cyclones, using satellite-based sea surface height data that provide a unique way of tracking the changes in ocean heat content on seasonal and longer timescales. We find that the long-term effect of cyclones is to warm the ocean at a rate of 0.32 +/- 0.15 PW between 1993 and 2009, i.e., similar to 23 times more efficiently per unit area than the background equatorial warming, making cyclones potentially important modulators of the climate by affecting heat transport in the ocean-atmosphere system. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the rate of warming increases with cyclone intensity. This, together with a predicted shift in the distribution of cyclones toward higher intensities as climate warms, suggests the ocean will get even warmer, possibly leading to a positive feedback.
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