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Because the vast majority of the world ocean's volume is deep water, the mean temperature of seawater is low; roughly 75% of the ocean's volume has a temperature from 0° – 5 °C (Pinet 1996). The same percentage falls in a salinity range between 34 and 35 ppt (3.4–3.5%) (Pinet 1996).
Aside from the oscillatory motions associated with tidal flow, there are two primary causes of large scale flow in the ocean: (1) thermohaline processes, which induce motion by introducing changes at the surface in temperature and salinity, and therefore in seawater density, and (2) wind forcing.
Conservative temperature is defined to be directly proportional to potential enthalpy. It is rescaled to have the same units as the in-situ temperature: = where = 3989.24495292815 J kg −1 K −1 is a reference value of the specific heat capacity, chosen to be as close as possible to the spatial average of the heat capacity over the entire ocean surface.
The majority of ocean heat gain occurs in the Southern Ocean. For example, between the 1950s and the 1980s, the temperature of the Antarctic Southern Ocean rose by 0.17 °C (0.31 °F), nearly twice the rate of the global ocean. [38] The warming rate varies with depth. The upper ocean (above 700 m) is warming the fastest.
The extent of the ocean surface down into the ocean is influenced by the amount of mixing that takes place between the surface water and the deeper water. This depends on the temperature: in the tropics the warm surface layer of about 100 m is quite stable and does not mix much with deeper water, while near the poles winter cooling and storms makes the surface layer denser and it mixes to ...
The dependence on pressure is not significant, since seawater is almost perfectly incompressible. [3] A change in the temperature of the water impacts on the distance between water parcels directly. [clarification needed] When the temperature of the water increases, the distance between water parcels will increase and hence the density will ...
Effect of temperature and salinity upon sea water density maximum and sea water freezing temperature. It has long been known that wind can drive ocean currents, but only at the surface. [12] In the 19th century, some oceanographers suggested that the convection of heat could drive deeper currents.
The ocean contains 97% of Earth's water and is the primary component of Earth's hydrosphere and is thereby essential to life on Earth. The ocean influences climate and weather patterns, the carbon cycle, and the water cycle by acting as a huge heat reservoir. (Full article...) Waves in Pacifica, California. A sea is a large body of salt water.