Quantifying the Relationship Between Atmospheric CO2 and the Ocean Heat Content
Our current climate crisis is in dire need of attention. The detrimental effects of climate change are more and more real as each day comes. In order to be able to generate solutions to the current climate crisis, one must understand what the climate is and how its system works. For starters, climate is the overarching pattern of the weather in a specific geographical area over a long period of time. On the other hand, the climate system is composed of the interactions between five different elements: the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and lithosphere. These elements are not independent from each other, rather they interact with each other, and are interconnected. An interaction that many scientists and researchers have been looking at is the interaction between the atmosphere and hydrosphere (the different bodies of water on earth). My research project’s main focus was to primarily analyze this relationship by looking at the atmospheric CO2 levels (maintained by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego) and the ocean heat content (collected by the Argo Program). Although results are still being produced, the quantification of this relationship is being done through some integration and programming languages that have facilitated the computations.
