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The reappearance of a northeast Pacific marine heatwave (MHW) sounded alarms in late summer 2019 for a warming event on par with the 2013–2016 MHW known as The Blob. Despite these two events having...

[1] The time-history of sea surface height (SSH) anomaly data from the TOPEX and Jason-1 altimeters is examined along the equator and northward following the west coast of the Americas. Along-track TOPEX and Jason-1 altimeter data are put into an alongshore–offshore coordinate system and then smoothed. This procedure increases the degrees of freedom in individual estimates of long-wavelength coastally trapped waves (CTWs) during times when both satellites are available (2002–2005). Equatorially trapped Kelvin waves are detected during the 2002–2003 El Nino. These Kelvin waves excite CTWs that travel northward along the west coast of the Americas. While CTWs associated with the 2002–2003 equatorial Kelvin waves are not always discernible along the entire coast, correlations of the coastal and equatorial SSH over the entire period of TOPEX and Jason-1 overlap show a clear phase progression. This phase progression implies remote influence of equatorial Kelvin waves that may reach as far north as the Bering Sea during the weak to moderate El Nino events that occurred from 2002 to 2005.

The recent cooling signal in the upper ocean reported by Lyman et al. [2006] is shown to be an artifact that was caused by a large cold bias discovered in a small fraction of Argo floats as well as a smaller but more prevalent warm bias in eXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT) data. These biases are both substantially larger than sampling errors estimated in Lyman et al. [2006].

We observe a net loss of 3.2 (± 1.1) × 10 22 J of heat from the upper ocean between 2003 and 2005. Using a broad array of in situ ocean measurements, we present annual estimates of global upper-ocean heat content anomaly from 1993 through 2005. Including the recent downturn, the average warming rate for the entire 13-year period is 0.33 ± 0.23 W/m 2 (of the Earth's total surface area). A new estimate of sampling error in the heat content record suggests that both the recent and previous global cooling events are significant and unlikely to be artifacts of inadequate ocean sampling.