As we continue to watch the Arctic warm, air temperatures often catch our attention, but what matters even more to long term warming is the ocean heat content.
Here are the Coral Reef Watch daily global sea surface temperatures at 5 km resolution for July 12, 2016 displayed in Google Earth.
Note that much of the water surrounding the ice is above 0 C. While we might assume this is normal, what is striking and sobering is the SST anomaly. The Coral Reef Watch base climatology is 1985-2012. Their description is:
"The climatology used for CRW's new 5-km Geo-Polar Blended Night-only products was produced using night-only values for the 28-year period 1985-2012 from the 4-km Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Pathfinder Version 5.2 SST (PFV5.2) data set, an official NOAA climate data record. We used the 28-year period to produce 12 monthly mean climatologies. The 5-km climatological average values were bias-adjusted to match the 5-km SST data."
So what's the anomaly for July 12, 2016? A lot of heated water..... in many areas more than 4C above the climatology.
If one is wondering where the new global warming heat is going....it is in the Arctic waters.