Weather Whys; Global Ocean Warming

This is weather wise. If global warming really is occurring, it's not just the air temperatures that are affected. The temperatures of the oceans should increase as well, but that's hard to measure. It would take a lot of weather instruments installed in a lot of very remote oceanic locations to give scientists the information they would need. Now, scientists have come up with an easier way to measure ocean warming by using the speed of sound. Researchers from Australia and the United States installed a device underwater in a remote area of the Atlantic Ocean. The instrument emitted a periodic pulse of sound, and since sound travels through water with relatively little loss, the signal was picked up by several specially tuned receivers around the Atlantic. The scientists then measured the time it took for the signal to arrive at each point. For instance, it took about three and a half hours for the signal to reach receivers in North America. In the future, researchers will repeat the experiment and measure the sound's travel time again.

With that information, they can determine the speed of the sound through the water. After all, sound travels faster through warmer water than through colder water. So, if the scientists find that in later experiments, the speed of the sound is significantly greater than it was before, they can conclude the ocean has experienced warming. That type of information may prove extremely useful to them as they continue efforts to get to the bottom of the global warming controversy. Weather-wise is produced with the assistance of the National Weather Service Forecast Office and the National Severe Storms Laboratory, both in Norman, Oklahoma, and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, the Oklahoma Climateological Survey, and the School of Meteorology, all at the University of Oklahoma. Weather-wise is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation. To weather-wise, I'm Drew Barlow.