Indian Ocean may be cause of warming slowdown

Nature : A new study suggests that the Indian Ocean may be storing 70% of the heat absorbed by upper oceans globally over the past decade. If so, that could be a major reason why global warming has appeared to slow in the same period. Observers had thought that the slowdown was due to oceans absorbing heat from the atmosphere, but measurements of upper ocean temperatures showed them to be lower than expected in the Pacific Ocean and higher than expected in the Indian Ocean. Now Sang-Ki Lee of the University of Miami, Florida, and his colleagues have created a model that explains how heat could have flowed from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean through Indonesia. However, the model only looks at the upper 700 m, so it doesn’t account for heat sinking to deeper levels. Also, some separate temperature estimates based on satellite data don’t match the NOAA data that Lee’s team used for their model.