2018 Continues record global ocean warming

The increasing heat-trapping gases emitted by human activities into the atmosphere produce an energy imbalance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation that leads to global heating (Rhein et al., 2013; Trenberth et al., 2014; von Schuckmann et al., 2016). The vast majority of global warming heat ends up deposited in the world’s oceans, and ocean heat content (OHC) change is one of the best—if not the best—metric for climate change (Cheng et al., 2019). In 2018, continued record heat was measured in the Earth’s climate system. In fact, 2018 has set a new record of ocean heating, surpassing 2017, which was the previous warmest year ever recorded (Cheng et al., 2018) (Fig.1).