February 7, 2023 –A new study says sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico have warmed about twice as much as global ocean waters since 1970.
Those findings indicate the Gulf of Mexico may be one more U.S. region where higher sea surface temperatures are outpacing global averages. Another is the Gulf of Maine, where the rate has been nearly triple of the world’s other oceans since the early 1980s.
The latest research comes from a joint effort between scientists at the National Centers for Environmental Information and the Northern Gulf Institute (NGI), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Cooperative Institute. It quantifies the warming trend in the Gulf of Mexico’s ocean heat content over the past 50 years.
The study, published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, shows that waters closest to the surface in the Gulf of Mexico have increased at a rate approximately twice that of the global ocean in the decades between 1970 and 2020.