These oceanographies shared relatively warm temperature of above 25°C.
"There is a close correlation between the rate of sea-level rise and the sea surface temperature," says Sugata Hazra, head of oceanography at Kolkata's Jadavpur University.
Physical oceanography deals with the properties of seawater (temperature, density, pressure, and so on), its movement (waves, currents, and tides), and the interactions between the ocean waters and the atmosphere.
A paper published last year by Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that accounting for the changes in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures allowed their model to reproduce the slowed global surface warming over the past 10 to 15 years.
David Pierce, a climate researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., said, "Usually the atmosphere starts responding to those temperature changes, but this year it didn't".
Other facets—such as temperature profiles or mineral content are covered by the sciences of hydrology and oceanography.
At the AAAS meeting, various researchers put forward ideas about what might be magnifying the feeble signals from the sun.SunstrokeWarren White of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues were the first to find that sea-surface temperatures across the globe swing up and down in a 10-to 12-year period that lags behind the solar cycle by two to three years.
Most recently, Munk--a longtime researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography--headed the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate Project that aims to measure ocean temperature with sound pulses.
A study published in Nature in 2013 by Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in San Diego, argued that cooling in the eastern Pacific explained most of the difference between actual temperatures and models of the climate that predict continuous warming.
"Atmospheric events" could be pushing additional heat into the gulf, causing a "perfect storm" of conditions that combine to dramatically raise temperatures there, said Nick Record, a research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, a Maine center for oceanography.
