Figure | Earth’s surface temperature history (a) Temperature from instrumental data for 1850–2023 using different observations: HadCRUT 5.0 (black), NOAA GlobalTemp (blue), Berkeley Earth (magenta), and GISTEMP v4 (orange). Markers indicate the global warming anomaly in 2023. (b) 30-year moving trends in global mean surface temperature. Gray shading indicates the 95% range of the uncertainty associated with the HadCRUT5 estimate. All temperatures are relative to the 1850–1900 reference period. (c) Spatially resolved warming trends relative to the global warming rate (°C per decade) for Berkeley Earth over the period 1994–2023. Purple contour indicates the East Asia region as defined in IPCC AR6.

Fundamental

▶ The main reason of the global surface warming is the changes of mean states and long-term variability in ocean and atmosphere by the greenhouse gas increase. Therefore, understanding the mechanism what induces the changes of atmosphere and ocean, is important. 

▶ The ocean, which has the highest heat capacity in the climate system, has experienced significant change in global heat content over the past 40 years [levitus et al, 2000]. To understand the ocean’s role in climate system, the ocean’s ability to store and transportheat has been studied in several researches [levitus et al, 2000, 2005, 2009;Gouretski and Koltermann, 2007; Domingues et al, 2008], in association with theocean’s significant contribution to global warming and climate change [Houghtonet al, 1996].

▶ The recent sea surface temperature (SST) of marginal sea becomes much warmer than the SST of a global SST [Yeh and Kim, 2012; Lima and David, 2012]. The larger SST is associated with northerly wind in Yellow sea and East China Sea. This results in the changes in the wind flow in western Pacific Ocean along with the change in the precipitation in East China and Korea peninsula. It indicates that the marginal SST can contribute on atmospheric variability. In addition, warming in Yellow Sea is associated with in the warming in East China Sea and South China Sea.