Climate change is making one of the world's strongest currents flow faster - Science Daily

Researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and UC Riverside used satellite measurements of sea-surface height and data collected by the global network of ocean floats called Argo to detect a trend in Southern Ocean upper layer velocity that had been hidden to scientists until now.

The team representing the National Science Foundation-funded Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) project reports its findings in the Nov.

"From both observations and models, we find that the ocean heat change is causing the significant ocean current acceleration detected during recent decades," said Jia-Rui Shi, formerly a PhD student at Scripps Oceanography and currently a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

This warmer part of the Southern Ocean takes up a lot of the heat that human activities are adding to Earth's atmosphere.

That network of autonomous floats, which measure ocean conditions such as temperature and salinity, began in 1999 and reached full capacity in 2007.

Study co-authors said it is also likely that the speed of the current will increase even more as the Southern Ocean continues to take up heat from human-induced global warming.