https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3xynwwx4yo

The waters of the north Pacific have had their warmest summer on record, according to BBC analysis of a mysterious marine heatwave that has confounded climate scientists.

Sea surface temperatures between July and September were more than 0.25C above the previous high of 2022 – a big increase across an area roughly ten times the size of the Mediterranean.

While climate change is known to make marine heatwaves more likely, scientists are struggling to explain why the north Pacific has been so hot for so long.

But all this extra heat in the so-called “warm blob” may have the opposite effect in the UK, possibly making a colder start to winter more likely, some researchers believe.

“There’s definitely something unusual going on in the north Pacific,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a research group in the US.

Such a jump in temperatures across a region so large is “quite remarkable”, he added.

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Global warming, caused by humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases, has already trebled the number of days of extreme heat in oceans globally, according to research published earlier this year.

But temperatures have been even higher than most climate models – computer simulations taking into account humanity’s carbon emissions – had predicted.

Analysis of these models by the Berkeley Earth group suggests that sea temperatures observed across the north Pacific in August had less than a 1% chance of occurring in any single year.

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Original article at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3xynwwx4yo