The Tropical Warm Pool (TWP) or Indo-Pacific Warm Pool is a mass of ocean water located in the western
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the conti ...
and eastern
Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by ...
which consistently exhibits the highest water temperatures over the largest expanse of the Earth's surface. Its intensity and extent appear to oscillate over a time period measured in decades.
The Indo-Pacific warm pool has been warming rapidly and expanding during the recent decades, largely from
climate change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to ...
in response to increased carbon emissions from
fossil fuel
A fossil fuel is a hydrocarbon-containing material formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the remains of dead plants and animals that is extracted and burned as a fuel. The main fossil fuels are coal, oil, and natural gas. Fossil fuels ma ...
burning. The warm pool expanded double its size, from an area of 22 million km
2 during 1900–1980, to an area of 40 million km
2 during 1981–2018.
This expansion of the warm pool has allowed more
cyclones
In meteorology, a cyclone () is a large air mass that rotates around a strong center of low atmospheric pressure, counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere as viewed from above (opposite to an an ...
, as well as altered global rainfall patterns and variations , by changing the life cycle of the
Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), which is the most dominant mode of weather fluctuation originating in the tropics.
See also
*
Maritime Continent
Maritime Continent is the name given primarily by meteorologists and oceanographers to the region of Southeast Asia which comprises, amongst other countries, Indonesia, Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Located between the Indian and Pacific Oc ...
References
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Regional climate effects
Tropical meteorology