Scientists discover the link between ocean weather and global climate

 

An international team of scientists led by Hussein Aluie, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Rochester, United Kingdom, and a scientist at the University’s Lase Energy Laboratory, has found the first direct test liking seemingly random weather system in the ocean to the global climate, according to the journal ‘Science Advances’.

According to Benjamin Storer, lead author of the study and associate researcher of the Aluie Turbulence and Complex Flux Group, there are weather patterns similar to terrestrial ones in the ocean, but at different time scales and length.

A weather pattern on land can last a few days and be about 500 kilometres wide, while ocean patterns, such as swirls, last between three and four weeks, but are one fifth of their size.

“Scientist have long speculated on the possibility that these ubiquitous and seemingly random ocean movements will communicate with the climate scales, but it has always been vague because it was not clear how to unravel this complex system to measure its interactions”, says Aluie. “We’ve developed a framework that can do exactly that. What we found was not what people expected because it requires the mediation of the atmosphere”.

The group’s goal was to understand how energy passed through the different ocean channels across the planet. They used a mathematical method developed by Aluie in 2019, which was later implemented in an advanced code by Storer and Aluie, which allowed them to study the transfer of energy through different patterns ranging from the circumference of the globe to 10 kilometers. There techniques were then applied to ocean data sets from an advanced climate model and satellite observations.