The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences (XMAS 2025)

The vertical distribution of Earth's energy conservation caused by greenhouse gases in the ocean is of great significance for understanding the marine climate system. The concentration of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere gradually increases with human activities, and its greenhouse effect leads to global warming. And the ocean absorbs the vast majority of the heat accumulated by the greenhouse effect. In the context of the continuous increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, the warming process of the global oceans over the past few decades is particularly noteworthy. Its changes can be reflected by Ocean Heat Content (OHC), which is an important indicator for understanding the Earth's climate and an important expression and direct response of ocean heat storage.
This paper is based on the ocean temperature observation data of IAP and EN4 from 1980 to 2020, and uses global 1 ° x 1 ° grid integration to calculate the ocean OHC at different depths. It is found that OHC is mainly stored in the equatorial Pacific, North Atlantic, and Southern Ocean. To reflect the acceleration of ocean warming, the acceleration of OHC changes was calculated. The analysis results showed that :(1) Through calculation, it was found that the OHC in the global depths of 0-700m and 700-2000m showed an accelerating upward trend.

Specifically, the OHC increase is most significant in the 0-300m depth layer, followed by the 700-2000m depth layer, while the growth rate is slowest in the 300-700m layer. (2) In the analysis of various oceans, the South Ocean has the largest change in OHC, followed by the Atlantic Ocean and finally the Indo Pacific Ocean. The trend of changes in different depth layers also reflects this result, especially when comparing the OHC changes in the baseline period from 1980 to 1990 and the following three decades.

ocean heat content,observation records,global warming