| Session Details | |
| Section | OS - Ocean Sciences |
| Session Title | Progress In Ocean Heat Uptake And Sea Level Studies |
| Main Convener | Dr. Xuebin Zhang (CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Australia) |
| Co-convener(s) | Dr. John Church (CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Australia) Prof. Xianyao Chen (Ocean University of China, China) Dr. Shuhei Masuda (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, Japan) |
| Session Description | As two robust indicators of climate change, ocean warming and sea level rise are closely related, with ocean thermal expansion induced by heat uptake being a dominant contributor to sea level rise. The majority of extra heat uptake into the earth system is absorbed by the ocean, thus understanding the ocean heat uptake and its redistribution within the ocean is very critical for us to answer questions such as energy budget of the ocean and earth system, sea level budget, ocean’s modulation of climate change, slow-down of surface warming in recent decade (so-called heat hiatus), dominant physical processes through which extra ocean heat uptake is redistributed, separation of externally-forced from internally-generated signals in ocean heat content, etc. Global mean sea level has been generally rising, mainly due to ocean thermal expansion and melting of land ice. In addition to global mean sea level change, sea level change occur over a wide range of spatio-temporal scales. In fact, regional sea level change can be as large as or even larger than the global mean change. Therefore, for regional planning, adaptation and mitigation purpose, it’s critical to understand regional sea level change and its coastal impacts, which was recently identified as one of five Grand Challenges by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). This session solicits contributions from a broad scope of presentations on either ocean heat uptake, or sea level, or both, e.g., ranging from observation-based studies to modelling-based studies, from global studies to regional studies, from remote sensed to in-situ observed analyses, from ocean-only modelling to fully-coupled earth system modelling, with the aim to share new findings in these two topics, prompt dialogue and exchange between the ocean heat content and sea level research communities. |