State of the Oceans -- December 12, 2022

 I write this every week when the new current maps.  For the sake of new Mastodon readers (yeah for both of you!), I will go over the basics.

This is the map of current Argo floats in the ocean.  They are little things with lithium batteries and aluminum casings.  Ships drop them off and they float and send signals.  They make regular deep dives to check things there.  When they are old, they sink and the aluminum fizzes.  When they come up, they send their location and this is mapped.  

The currents map is simply derived by the drift of the floats over the week.  The placement of the floats is uniform across the globe, so the ocean current results have good physics.

Of the most interest to the UK is the state of the Gulf Stream.  It has been this way since after the big 2016 shift.  It used to transfer a lot of heat to the UK, but now it is mostly dead.  You can see this on the temperature plots.

This is what I consider the most important area in the world.  The cold water is feeding into the Pacific Equatorial Belt.  It hasn't changed for the last few years.  When things were hotter, the feed came from the North.  Again the temperature plots show how cold it is.  I call it the Pacific Cold Phase because it looks permanent.  Others call it La Nina, in hopes that St. Nicholas will soon be there.

Finally we have the area that was most important during the regular El Nino and La Nina cycles.  The hot water would build up here, and actually raise the absolute sea level a little bit.  The forces would increase and suddenly let all the water out, like a dam busting.  The last big one was 2016, with a little half one a few years later.

This is the current ocean surface temperatures.  Good physics and accurate.  Our friends, the weather influencers are trying to come up with something that beats 'Polar Vortex Fairies".  That is, they propose that heat is still building up deep in the oceans.  But hot water always rises to the top, so these are the maximum temperatures.  They also purport that the ocean currents are driven by winds, but the energy cascade is such that the oceans are driven by heat energy, and the winds are driven by the heat coming from the water.  It's easy enough to test this Internet Myth.