Vattnets kretslopp har intensifierats med en med en ökande vattenomsättning genom evaporation och nederbörd som modeller tidigare visat. Detta ökar kontrasten mellan våta och torra områden och bekräftar "wet will get wetter, dry will ger drier" och är sannolikt en av mekanismerna som ökar brandrisken i exempelvis Australien och sydvästra USA. Liksom det ökar kontrasten i saltkoncenteation mellan ytvattnet och vatten längre ned.
Detta har bekräftats genom att studera saltkoncenteationer som ökar där avdunstning är hög och avtar där vattnet sedan landar som nederbörd.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/jcli/article/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-20-0366.1/354497/Improved-estimates-of-changes-in-upper-ocean
En bra analys om lite av vad detta medför:
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14092020/ocean-saltwater-climate-change-extreme-weather
Några exempel.
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"The wildfires keep getting worse as the dry areas get drier," he said. This year it's California, last year it was Australia. As the pattern persists, that's when the chances increase for the effects to really accumulate and do damage. It's very easy to say this is weather, this is just one event, but the study shows it's part of a bigger pattern.
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Salinity also influences seawater density, which determines the distribution of warm and cold layers of water in the ocean. That stratification has an impact on ocean circulation, tropical storms, ocean oxygen levels and nutrients in the upper ocean, Mann added. The study creates a salinity index that "provides a particularly clean, low noise, high signal, means for detecting the climate change signal," he said.
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"First, ocean organisms are adapted to certain salinities," he said. "If these start to change, then, along with warming and ocean acidification, it begins to challenge the adaptive capacity of marine organisms and ultimately the ocean food chain, and us."
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The new study details regional changes—including increasing salt concentrations—in parts of the Caribbean and Indian Oceans, indicating less rainfall. The concentration of freshwater is increasing, on the other hand, across the Pacific and in the North Atlantic, where it could disrupt the Gulf Stream and the underlying Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, a critical conveyor belt for global heat all the way from the Arctic to the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, said co-author Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State.*