CPO’s Climate Observation Division supported a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters. The goal of this manuscript--”The impact of historical biases on the XBT-derived meridional overturning circulation estimates at 34°S”--is assess how the historical expendable bathythermograph measurement errors may affect the meridional mass and heat transport across one key ocean section in the South Atlantic Ocean.
By simulating expendable bathythermograph observations since the 1970s in a high horizontal resolution ocean model , the authors show that historical XBT errors can produce biases that are higher than the intrinsic trends and that are statistically significant after the 1990s, coincident with changes made in some of the XBT probe components.
Earth & Space Science News (EOS) featured a story on the paper, to read it, visit:
eos.org/research-spotlights/
The original paper was published online in March 2015: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL061802/abstract