Sea Surface Temperatures along the Coast of British Columbia: Regional Evidence for a Warming Trend

Abstract

Sea-surface temperature has been measured at a large number of sites around the coast of British Columbia for periods well in excess of 50 yr. These time series are long enough to give clear evidence of a large scale secular warming. For the purposes of this paper the daily SST observations are decimated to monthly mean values. The observations are of particular value because observation methods have remained invariant throughout the observation period, and many of the stations are remote from civilisation allowing trends to be estimated that have not been contaminated with urbanization effects. Eighteen out of nineteen stations that are currently being sampled show a warming trend, the one that shows a cooling trend is the shortest time series, only in its eleventh year. The sea-surface temperatures at sites exposed to the Pacific Ocean show very high coherence with global scale air temperature variations but no relationship to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation signal.