Southern Ocean warming and its climatic impacts

Despite a projected ozone recovery, fluxes to the Southern Ocean of radiative heat and freshwater from enhanced precipitation and melting sea ice, ice shelves, and ice sheets are expected to increase, as is a Southern Ocean westerly poleward intensification.

The warming has far-reaching climatic implications for melt of Antarctic ice shelf and ice sheet, sea level rise, and remote circulations such as the intertropical convergence zone and tropical ocean-atmosphere circulations, which affect extreme weathers, agricul-ture, and ecosystems. The surface warm and freshwater anomalies are advected northward by the mean circulation and deposited into the ocean interior with a zonal-mean maximum at-45 degrees S. The increased momentum and buoyancy fluxes enhance the Southern Ocean circulation and water mass transforma-tion, further increasing the heat uptake.