The ocean takes up about 93% of the global warming heat entering Earth’s climate system. In addition, the associated thermal expansion contributes substantially to sea-level rise. Hence, quantifying the oceanic heat uptake rate and its statistical significance has been a research focus. Here we use gridded ocean heat content maps to examine regional trends in ocean warming for 0–700 m depth from 1993–2019 and 1968–2019, periods based on sampling distributions. The maps are from four research groups, three based on ocean temperature alone and one combining ocean temperature with satellite altimeter sea-level anomalies. We show that use of longer periods results in larger percentages of ocean area with statistically significant warming trends and less ocean area covered by statistically significant cooling trends. We discuss relations of these patterns to climate phenomena, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and global warming.

海洋吸收了进入地球气候系统的全球变暖热量的约93％。另外，相关的热膨胀在很大程度上促进了海平面的上升。因此，量化海洋热量吸收率及其统计意义一直是研究的重点。在这里，我们使用网格化的海洋热量含量图，根据采样分布，研究了1993-2019年和1968-2019年0-700 m深度海洋变暖的区域趋势。这些地图来自四个研究小组，三个小组仅基于海洋温度，一个小组将海洋温度与卫星高度计海平面异常结合在一起。我们表明，使用更长的时间会导致更大的海洋区域百分比具有统计学上显着的变暖趋势，而更少的海洋区域则具有统计学上显着的降温趋势。