September 8, 2022 — It’s not just land seeing record heat waves.
Ocean waters in the Northern Hemisphere have been unusually warm in recent weeks, with parts of the North Atlantic and northern Pacific undergoing particularly intense marine heat waves.
Sea surface temperatures in these regions hit record levels this summer, said Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Parts of the Pacific and North Atlantic have been anywhere from 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) to 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) warmer than average at times, conditions that have not been observed since record keeping began roughly six decades ago.