Combining sea surface height data with temperature profile data to estimate global upper ocean heat content anomaly

Altimetric sea surface height data was combined with ~2000000 temperature profiles to estimate global upper 750m ocean heat content anomaly. The results showed that most of the 10-year variation signals could be resolved by in-situ temperature profiles alone, but in the regions where in-situ data were sparse(e.g., the Southern Ocean), the temperature data were not enough to resolve the changing signals. The global upper ocean had a warming rate of about 1.17 W/m2from 1993 to 2009, and the most significant oceanic warming occurred near 40oS. Most of the interannual variability in the global ocean heat storage was related to the El Ni o and Southern Oscillation(ENSO). The variability of heat content in the tropical oceans was relatively steady, but that in the mid and high latitudes, especially in the Southern Ocean, exceeded that of the tropical oceans after 2001. As the Argo global ocean real-time observing array is fully complete, the amount of in-situ data at any moment will dramatically exceed the total amount of the data in the past decades. Combining with Jason and TOPEX/Poseidon altimeter data, the Argo data is able to estimate the variability of the global upper ocean heat content, thus providing important scientific evidence for global climate change.