Tidal clue to ocean warming

For scientists trying to monitor, model or predict climate change, accurate information about temperatures on the Earth are vital, and this just doesn't just mean on the land’s surface; it means understanding how temperatures are changing throughout the atmosphere, and what happens to heat when it percolates through the various layers. One important factor is surprisingly hard to measure: how heat affects the sea.

It's thought that a great deal of the heat that passes through the atmosphere, and which climatologists believe is trapped by greenhouse gases, ends up in the oceans. But the only part of the sea where temperature is easy to measure is the surface; figuring out temperatures in the depths is neither easy nor cheap, but because of the huge volume of water on the planet and the amount of heat that it can store, it's very important for assessing the effect on the overall climate. Oceanographer Zhongxiang Zhao of the University of Washington has been studying the behaviour of the deep ocean and believes that he might have found a new method involving satellite data that is already available.