Missing(?) heat isn’t missing after all | Climate Etc.

Those measurements are at the heart of a puzzle climate scientists have been trying hard to crack: why, as greenhouse gas emissions rose and satellite data showed an increasing amount of energy trapped in the planet’s atmosphere, the amount of heat absorbed by the world’s oceans — a major heat sink — wasn’t rising as quickly.One answer to the puzzle came from climate scientists Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who coined the term “missing heat” — and later suggested it may be stored in the deep ocean, where there are few measurements to track the energy’s path.But new research, published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience, argues that what Trenberth and Fasullo dubbed “missing heat” isn’t missing, after all — that the amount of radiation trapped in Earth’s atmosphere, as measured by satellite sensors, is consistent with measurements of heat absorbed by the ocean.Any discrepancy falls within the margin of error on those measurements, say the study’s authors, led by NASA climate scientist Norman Loeb.“Given that there’s a lot of uncertainty in the ocean measurements, given that there was this transition from XBT to Argo right around the time that satellite data and ocean data deviated, it raises a lot questions in my mind about whether you can say there is missing energy,” Loeb said.His analysis examining the amount of solar radiation entering and leaving the atmosphere estimates the heat content of the upper ocean using three different data sets.Loeb’s conclusion? That, if you consider the margin of error on the satellite and ocean measurements, the two data sources are in agreement — and there may not be any “missing energy.”
“It’s not to say that it’s not happening,” Loeb said. “It’s just that you can’t easily make that conclusion from the data.”