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Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 102(10), (2021): E1897–E1935, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0316.1., Life on Earth vitally depends on the availability of water. Human pressure on freshwater resources is increasing, as is human exposure to weather-related extremes (droughts, storms, floods) caused by climate change. Understanding these changes is pivotal for developing mitigation and adaptation strategies. The Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) defines a suite of essential climate variables (ECVs), many related to the water cycle, required to systematically monitor Earth’s climate system. Since long-term observations of these ECVs are derived from different observation techniques, platforms, instruments, and retrieval algorithms, they often lack the accuracy, completeness, and resolution, to consistently characterize water cycle variability at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Here, we review the capability of ground-based and remotely sensed observations of water cycle ECVs to consistently observe the hydrological cycle. We evaluate the relevant land, atmosphere, and ocean water storages and the fluxes between them, including anthropogenic water use. Particularly, we assess how well they close on multiple temporal and spatial scales. On this basis, we discuss gaps in observation systems and formulate guidelines for future water cycle observation strategies. We conclude that, while long-term water cycle monitoring has greatly advanced in the past, many observational gaps still need to be overcome to close the water budget and enable a comprehensive and consistent assessment across scales. Trends in water cycle components can only be observed with great uncertainty, mainly due to insufficient length and homogeneity. An advanced closure of the water cycle requires improved model–data synthesis capabilities, particularly at regional to local scales., WD acknowledges ESA’s QA4EO (ISMN) and CCI Soil Moisture projects. WD, CRV, AG, and KL acknowledge the G3P project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement 870353. MIH and MS acknowledge ESA’s CCI Water Vapour project. MS and RH acknowledges the support by the EUMETSAT member states through CM SAF. DGM acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) under Grant Agreement 715254 (DRY–2–DRY). Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004)., 2022-04-01

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 102(8), (2021): S143–S198, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-21-0083.1., This chapter details 2020 global patterns in select observed oceanic physical, chemical, and biological variables relative to long-term climatologies, their differences between 2020 and 2019, and puts 2020 observations in the context of the historical record. In this overview we address a few of the highlights, first in haiku, then paragraph form: La Niña arrives, shifts winds, rain, heat, salt, carbon: Pacific—beyond. Global ocean conditions in 2020 reflected a transition from an El Niño in 2018–19 to a La Niña in late 2020. Pacific trade winds strengthened in 2020 relative to 2019, driving anomalously westward Pacific equatorial surface currents. Sea surface temperatures (SSTs), upper ocean heat content, and sea surface height all fell in the eastern tropical Pacific and rose in the western tropical Pacific. Efflux of carbon dioxide from ocean to atmosphere was larger than average across much of the equatorial Pacific, and both chlorophyll-a and phytoplankton carbon concentrations were elevated across the tropical Pacific. Less rain fell and more water evaporated in the western equatorial Pacific, consonant with increased sea surface salinity (SSS) there. SSS may also have increased as a result of anomalously westward surface currents advecting salty water from the east. El Niño–Southern Oscillation conditions have global ramifications that reverberate throughout the report., Argo data used in the chapter were collected and made freely available by the International Argo Program and the national programs that contribute to it. (https://argo.ucsd.edu, https://www.ocean-ops. org). The Argo Program is part of the Global Ocean Observing System. Many authors of the chapter are supported by NOAA Research, the NOAA Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program, or the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program. • L. Cheng is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (42076202) and Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB42040402. • R. E. Killick is supported by the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by BEIS and Defra. PMEL contribution numbers 5214, 5215, 5216, 5217, and 5247.

© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Phillips, H. E., Tandon, A., Furue, R., Hood, R., Ummenhofer, C. C., Benthuysen, J. A., Menezes, V., Hu, S., Webber, B., Sanchez-Franks, A., Cherian, D., Shroyer, E., Feng, M., Wijesekera, H., Chatterjee, A., Yu, L., Hermes, J., Murtugudde, R., Tozuka, T., Su, D., Singh, A., Centurioni, L., Prakash, S., Wiggert, J. Progress in understanding of Indian Ocean circulation, variability, air-sea exchange, and impacts on biogeochemistry. Ocean Science, 17(6), (2021): 1677–1751, https://doi.org/10.5194/os-17-1677-2021., Over the past decade, our understanding of the Indian Ocean has advanced through concerted efforts toward measuring the ocean circulation and air–sea exchanges, detecting changes in water masses, and linking physical processes to ecologically important variables. New circulation pathways and mechanisms have been discovered that control atmospheric and oceanic mean state and variability. This review brings together new understanding of the ocean–atmosphere system in the Indian Ocean since the last comprehensive review, describing the Indian Ocean circulation patterns, air–sea interactions, and climate variability. Coordinated international focus on the Indian Ocean has motivated the application of new technologies to deliver higher-resolution observations and models of Indian Ocean processes. As a result we are discovering the importance of small-scale processes in setting the large-scale gradients and circulation, interactions between physical and biogeochemical processes, interactions between boundary currents and the interior, and interactions between the surface and the deep ocean. A newly discovered regional climate mode in the southeast Indian Ocean, the Ningaloo Niño, has instigated more regional air–sea coupling and marine heatwave research in the global oceans. In the last decade, we have seen rapid warming of the Indian Ocean overlaid with extremes in the form of marine heatwaves. These events have motivated studies that have delivered new insight into the variability in ocean heat content and exchanges in the Indian Ocean and have highlighted the critical role of the Indian Ocean as a clearing house for anthropogenic heat. This synthesis paper reviews the advances in these areas in the last decade., Helen E. Phillips acknowledges support from the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub and Climate Systems Hub of the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Programme and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. Amit Tandon acknowledges the US Office of Naval Research. This is INCOIS contribution no. 437.

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Yu, L., & Yang, K. A warm and a cold spot in Cape Cod waters amid the recent New England Shelf Warming. Frontiers in Marine Science, 9, (2022): 922046, https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2022.922046., Despite the widely recognized warming of the New England Continental Shelf (NES), climate patterns of the shelf’s economically and ecologically important coastal environments remain less examined. Here we use a satellite sea-surface temperature (SST) analysis gridded on 0.05°C spatial resolution to show, for the first time, the existence of a warm and a cold spot in the environs of Cape Cod, Massachusetts amid the NES warming of the past 15 years. The warm spot refers to an increasing warming trend in shallow waters of Nantucket Sound sheltered by the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The summer SST maxima have increased by 3.1±1.0°C (p<0.1), about three times faster than the warming elsewhere on the NES, and the summer season has lengthened by 20 ± 7 days (p<0.1). The cold spot refers to an increasing cooling trend over Nantucket Shoals, an area of shallow sandy shelf that extends south and southeast from Nantucket Island and also known for strong tidal mixing. The strong cooling trend during June–August reduced the SST maxima by -2.5±1.2°C (p<0.1) and shortened the warm season by -32 ± 11 days (p<0.1). Away from the Cape Cod waters, the broad warming on the shelf is attributable to a forward shifted annual cycle. The shift is most significant in August–November, during which the summer temperatures lingered longer into the fall, producing a pronounced warming and delaying the onset of the fall season by 13 ± 6 days (p<0.1). The three different patterns of SST phenology trends displayed by the respective warm spot, the cold spot, and the broad shelf highlight the highly dynamically diverse responses of coastal waters under climate warming. Finally, the study showed that spatial resolution of SST datasets affects the characterization of the spatial heterogeneity in the nearshore SSTs. The widely used Optimum Interpolation SST (OISST) on 0.25°C resolution was examined. Although the two SST datasets agree well with the measurements from the moored buoys at f, This study is supported by NOAA Global Ocean Monitoring and Observation (GOMO) Program, grand number NA19OAR4320074.

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2020. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101(11), (2020): E1891-E1913, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0209.1, The Indian Ocean Observing System (IndOOS), established in 2006, is a multinational network of sustained oceanic measurements that underpin understanding and forecasting of weather and climate for the Indian Ocean region and beyond. Almost one-third of humanity lives around the Indian Ocean, many in countries dependent on fisheries and rain-fed agriculture that are vulnerable to climate variability and extremes. The Indian Ocean alone has absorbed a quarter of the global oceanic heat uptake over the last two decades and the fate of this heat and its impact on future change is unknown. Climate models project accelerating sea level rise, more frequent extremes in monsoon rainfall, and decreasing oceanic productivity. In view of these new scientific challenges, a 3-yr international review of the IndOOS by more than 60 scientific experts now highlights the need for an enhanced observing network that can better meet societal challenges, and provide more reliable forecasts. Here we present core findings from this review, including the need for 1) chemical, biological, and ecosystem measurements alongside physical parameters; 2) expansion into the western tropics to improve understanding of the monsoon circulation; 3) better-resolved upper ocean processes to improve understanding of air–sea coupling and yield better subseasonal to seasonal predictions; and 4) expansion into key coastal regions and the deep ocean to better constrain the basinwide energy budget. These goals will require new agreements and partnerships with and among Indian Ocean rim countries, creating opportunities for them to enhance their monitoring and forecasting capacity as part of IndOOS-2., We thank the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and its core project on Climate and Ocean: Variability, Predictability and Change (CLIVAR), the Indian Ocean Global Ocean Observing System (IOGOOS), the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC-UNESCO), the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research (IMBeR) project, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) for providing the financial support to bring international scientists together to conduct this review. We thank the members of the independent review board that provided detailed feedbacks on the review report that is summarized in this article: P. E. Dexter, M. Krug, J. McCreary, R. Matear, C. Moloney, and S. Wijffels. PMEL Contribution 5041. C. Ummenhofer acknowledges support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award for Innovative Research., 2021-05-01

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2020. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Climate 33(17), (2020): 7697-7714, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-20-0115.1., The decadal to multidecadal mixed layer variability is investigated in a region south of the Kuroshio Extension (130°E–180°, 25°–35°N), an area where the North Pacific subtropical mode water forms, during 1948–2012. By analyzing the mixed layer heat budget with different observational and reanalysis data, here we show that the decadal to multidecadal variability of the mixed layer temperature and mixed layer depth is covaried with the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO), instead of the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). The mixed layer temperature has strong decadal to multidecadal variability, being warm before 1970 and after 1990 (AMO positive phase) and cold during 1970–90 (AMO negative phase), and so does the mixed layer depth. The dominant process for the mixed layer temperature decadal to multidecadal variability is the Ekman advection, which is controlled by the zonal wind changes related to the AMO. The net heat flux into the ocean surface Qnet acts as a damping term and it is mainly from the effect of latent heat flux and partially from sensible heat flux. While the wind as well as mixed layer temperature decadal changes related to the PDO are weak in the western Pacific Ocean. Our finding proposes the possible influence of the AMO on the northwestern Pacific Ocean mixed layer variability, and could be a potential predictor for the decadal to multidecadal climate variability in the western Pacific Ocean., Xiaopei Lin is supported by the China’s national key research and development projects (2016YFA0601803) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41925025 and U1606402). Baolan Wu is supported by the China Scholarship Council (201806330010). Lisan Yu thanks NOAA for support for her study on climate change and variability.

Global Oceans is one chapter from the State of the Climate in 2020 annual report and is available from https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-21-0083.1. Compiled by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, State of the Climate in 2020 is based on contributions from scientists from around the world. It provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments located on land, water, ice, and in space. The full report is available from https://doi.org/10.1175/2021BAMSStateoftheClimate.1

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 51(2), (2021): 457–474, https://doi.org/10.1175/JPO-D-20-0088.1., The meridional shift of the Kuroshio Extension (KE) front and changes in the formation of the North Pacific Subtropical Mode Water (STMW) during 1979–2018 are reported. The surface-to-subsurface structure of the KE front averaged over 142°–165°E has shifted poleward at a rate of ~0.23° ± 0.16° decade−1. The shift was caused mainly by the poleward shift of the downstream KE front (153°–165°E, ~0.41° ± 0.29° decade−1) and barely by the upstream KE front (142°–153°E). The long-term shift trend of the KE front showed two distinct behaviors before and after 2002. Before 2002, the surface KE front moved northward with a faster rate than the subsurface. After 2002, the surface KE front showed no obvious trend, but the subsurface KE front continued to move northward. The ventilation zone of the STMW, defined by the area between the 16° and 18°C isotherms or between the 25 and 25.5 kg m−3 isopycnals, contracted and displaced northward with a shoaling of the mixed layer depth hm before 2002 when the KE front moved northward. The STMW subduction rate was reduced by 0.76 Sv (63%; 1 Sv ≡ = 106 m3 s−1) during 1979–2018, most of which occurred before 2002. Of the three components affecting the total subduction rate, the temporal induction (−∂hm/∂t) was dominant accounting for 91% of the rate reduction, while the vertical pumping (−wmb) amounted to 8% and the lateral induction (−umb ⋅ ∇hm) was insignificant. The reduced temporal induction was attributed to both the contracted ventilation zone and the shallowed hm that were incurred by the poleward shift of KE front., Xiaopei Lin is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41925025 and 92058203) and China’s national key research and development projects (2016YFA0601803). Baolan Wu is supported by the China Scholarship Council (201806330010). Lisan Yu thanks NOAA for support for her study on climate change and variability.

© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Yu, L. Emerging pattern of wind change over the Eurasian marginal seas revealed by three decades of satellite ocean-surface wind observations. Remote Sensing, 13(9), (2021):1707, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13091707., This study provides the first full characterization of decadal changes of surface winds over 10 marginal seas along the Eurasian continent using satellite wind observations. During the three decades (1988–2018), surface warming has occurred in all seas at a rate more pronounced in the South European marginal seas (0.4–0.6 °C per decade) than in the monsoon-influenced North Indian and East Asian marginal seas (0.1–0.2 °C per decade). However, surface winds have not strengthened everywhere. On a basin average, winds have increased over the marginal seas in the subtropical/mid-latitudes, with the rate of increase ranging from 11 to 24 cms−1 per decade. These upward trends reflect primarily the accelerated changes in the 1990s and have largely flattened since 2000. Winds have slightly weakened or remained little changed over the marginal seas in the tropical monsoonal region. Winds over the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf underwent an abrupt shift in the late 1990s that resulted in an elevation of local wind speeds. The varying relationships between wind and SST changes suggest that different marginal seas have responded differently to environmental warming and further studies are needed to gain an improved understanding of climate change on a regional scale., This research was funded by NASA Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, grant number 80NSSC18M0079, NASA Ocean Vector Wind Science Team (OVWST) program, grant number NNX14AL82G, and NOAA Global Ocean Monitoring and Observation (GOMO) Program, grand number NA19OAR4320074.

Over the past decade, our understanding of the Indian Ocean has advanced through concerted efforts toward measuring the ocean circulation and its water properties, detecting changes in water masses, and linking physical processes to ecologically important variables. New circulation pathways and mechanisms have been discovered, which control atmospheric and oceanic mean state and variability. This review brings together new understanding of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Indian Ocean since the last comprehensive review, describing the Indian Ocean circulation patterns, air-sea interactions and climate variability. The second International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE-2) and related efforts have motivated the application of new technologies to deliver higher-resolution observations and models of Indian Ocean processes. As a result we are discovering the importance of small scale processes in setting the large-scale gradients and circulation, interactions between physical and biogeochemical processes, interactions between boundary currents and the interior, and between the surface and the deep ocean. In the last decade we have seen rapid warming of the Indian Ocean overlaid with extremes in the form of marine heatwaves. These events have motivated studies that have delivered new insight into the variability in ocean heat content and exchanges in the Indian Ocean, and climate variability on interannual to decadal timescales.This synthesis paper reviews the advances in these areas in the last decade.

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2020. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101(6), (2020): E744-E762, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0015.1., From 11 April to 11 June 2018 a new type of ocean observing platform, the Saildrone surface vehicle, collected data on a round-trip, 60-day cruise from San Francisco Bay, down the U.S. and Mexican coast to Guadalupe Island. The cruise track was selected to optimize the science team’s validation and science objectives. The validation objectives include establishing the accuracy of these new measurements. The scientific objectives include validation of satellite-derived fluxes, sea surface temperatures, and wind vectors and studies of upwelling dynamics, river plumes, air–sea interactions including frontal regions, and diurnal warming regions. On this deployment, the Saildrone carried 16 atmospheric and oceanographic sensors. Future planned cruises (with open data policies) are focused on improving our understanding of air–sea fluxes in the Arctic Ocean and around North Brazil Current rings., The Saildrone data collection mission was sponsored by the Saildrone Award, an annual data collection mission awarded by Saildrone Inc., and the Schmidt Family Foundation. The research was funded by the NASA Physical Oceanography Program Grant 80NSSC18K0837 and 80NSSC18K1441. The work by T. M. Chin, J. Vazquez-Cuerzo, and V. Tsontos was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Piero L.F. Mazzini was supported by California Sea Grant Award NA18OAR4170073. We thank CeNCOOS for providing the HF radar data in the Gulf of the Farallones. Jose Gomez-Valdes was supported by CONACYT Grant 257125, and by CICESE. Work by Joel Scott and Ivona Cetinic was supported through NASA PACE. The work by Lisan Yu was supported by NOAA Ocean Observing and Monitoring Division under Grant NA14OAR4320158.