Cooling off at the beach is getting much more difficult these days.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego recorded its highest ocean temperature ever on Wednesday. The temp of the water was 79.2 degrees Fahrenheit – which is the hottest recorded since they started tracking these things in 1916. The mark beat the previous record of 78.8 degrees which was set, you guessed it, last week.
Another sea-surface temperature record was broken today, August 8. Scripps scientists with @shoresta100 measured a water temp of 79.2°F (26.3°C) at the end of Scripps Pier. pic.twitter.com/XXgVt7wUR2
— Scripps Oceanography (@Scripps_Ocean) August 8, 2018
And while the ocean waters typically do warm up this time of year – it is summer after all – the record temperatures ate still about seven to eight degrees above normal.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, told the SF Gate that the readings are “extraordinary, and Miguel Miller, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in San Diego called them “remarkable.”
A National Weather Service buoy further off the San Diego coast recorded a high temperature of 81.3 degrees, which they say is possibly the “highest buoy temperature ever recorded” in the state’s waters.
Yesterday, Scripps researchers logged the warmest sea-surface temperature at Scripps Pier since records began in August 1916. The record temp—78.6 ℉—is the highest in 102 years of measurements. Data is maintained by the @shoresta100 program at Scripps. https://t.co/JnzGwRIIZW pic.twitter.com/pvOMzrK4Il
— Scripps Oceanography (@Scripps_Ocean) August 2, 2018
As for why the ocean is so hot these days, researchers told Mashable that weather plays a huge part, but things are given a substantial boost by human-caused global warming.
“Global warming is really ocean warming,” Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. “The heat being trapped is almost all in the ocean.”
