Settled science: Missing heat must be somewhere in the ocean where we can't measure it

Boulder scientists: Climate's 'missing heat' locked deep in the ocean - Boulder Daily Camera

...when researchers inventoried all the heat that warmed the land and the oceans since 2000 as well as the heat that is responsible for melting ice caps, sea ice and glaciers, they found that something was still missing.

"We attempted to add all these things up and said, 'Well, they don't actually balance,'" Trenberth said.

But Trenberth and his colleagues -- including lead author Gerald Meehl -- were able to show, using NCAR's Community Climate System Model, that the excess heat is likely buried deeper than 1,000 feet in the ocean, where researchers now have few reliable temperature gauges.

The study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"There's not very much in the way of deep ocean measurements," Trenberth said. "The challenge for us now is to find this in the observations. What the study has done is give us some real clues of where to look."