Seminar: Frederick Bingham

In the past couple of decades, there has developed an amazingly sophisticated system for measuring and predicting the state of the ocean. This system includes robotic floats, drones, gliders, drifters, volunteer ships, satellites and data-assimilating models. It gives us the ability to understand how climate change is impacting the ocean - 90% of excess heat that the Earth is absorbing is going into the ocean. This excess heat is leading to such consequences as ocean deoxygenation, sea level rise, coral bleaching and melting of the Arctic and Greenland. Our ocean observations also give us, for the first time, the ability to make intermediate-term (6-12 month) predictions of climate that promise immense benefits to humanity. One of the main problems this new system has solved is a nasty northern hemisphere sampling bias that we have been plagued with in the past.