Statistical evidence indicating no long-term climatic change in the deep waters of the north and south Pacific oceans

Abstract

No inference of climatic change appears to be warranted from an analysis of temperature and salinity values below 100 meters at 189 oceanographic stations in the North and South Pacific oceans. Data collected in the period 1929–1932 by the Carnegie, Dana, Scoresby, Discovery II, and International Fisheries expeditions were used as reference stations. These reference stations were paired with data collected between 1824 and 1958. Fifty percent of the stations were within 60 nautical miles of their reference stations, 30 per cent were between 60 and 120 nautical miles, and 20 per cent were between 120 and 568 nautical miles. The stations that were more than 120 nautical miles from their reference stations were included in order to obtain additional deep-station values, but they were limited to the same water mass as the reference stations. The analysis showed large random individual differences in both fields down to 1000 meters, and smaller but significant anomalies in several instances between 1000 and 5000 meters. For the data grouped by years or by water mass, scattered significant differences were observed at all levels and in all groups. Much larger samples are needed to separate statistically the short-period variability and the instrumental, processing, and interpolation errors from long-period change in deep waters.