Events

Speaker: Wenbo Wu, Assistant Scientist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Host: Zhe Jia

Title: Remote Sensing of Ocean Temperatures with Seismic-Acoustic Waves

Abstract: The ocean, with its immense heat-storage capacity, absorbs the majority of the excess energy resulting from anthropogenic greenhouse effects, playing a crucial role in regulating global climate and temperature changes. Accurately estimating global ocean temperature changes requires disentangling long-term trends from complex transient ocean dynamics. While increasing observational data has significantly improved the resolution and coverage of global temperature monitoring, fully resolving the long-term and transient signals remains a challenge. Acoustic thermometry, which tracks sound propagation speeds to infer temperature changes, offers a remote sensing tool for monitoring ocean temperatures. Seismic ocean thermometry (SOT), leveraging natural earthquake-generated acoustic waves (T-waves), provides a cost-efficient method to monitor large-scale average ocean temperature changes and transient signals. In this study, we applied SOT to the Indian Ocean and Northwest Pacific, successfully retrieving decadal warming trends and identifying strong transient signals, such as mesoscale eddies and biweekly equatorial waves. These findings demonstrate that SOT effectively complements existing point-based measurement techniques. This talk will also discuss the challenges and opportunities of global SOT in advancing ocean temperature monitoring.