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[1] Satellite altimetric height was combined with approximately 1,000,000 in situ temperature profiles to produce global estimates of upper ocean heat content, temperature, and thermosteric sea level variability on interannual timescales. Maps of these quantities from mid-1993 through mid-2003 were calculated using the technique developed by Willis et al. [2003]. The time series of globally averaged heat content contains a small amount of interannual variability and implies an oceanic warming rate of 0.86 ± 0.12 watts per square meter of ocean (0.29 ± 0.04 pW) from 1993 to 2003 for the upper 750 m of the water column. As a result of the warming, thermosteric sea level rose at a rate of 1.6 ± 0.3 mm/yr over the same time period. Maps of yearly heat content anomaly show patterns of warming commensurate with ENSO variability in the tropics, but also show that a large part of the trend in global, oceanic heat content is caused by regional warming at midlatitudes in the Southern Hemisphere. In addition to quantifying interannual variability on a global scale, this work illustrates the importance of maintaining continuously updated monitoring systems that provide global coverage of the world's oceans. Ongoing projects, such as the Jason/TOPEX series of satellite altimeters and the Argo float program, provide a critical foundation for characterizing variability on regional, basin, and global scales and quantifying the oceans' role as part of the climate system.

The Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO), defined as the leading empirical orthogonal function of North Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies, is a widely used index for decadal variability. It is shown that the PDO can be recovered from a reconstruction of North Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies based on a first-order autoregressive model and forcing by variability of the Aleutian low, El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and oceanic zonal advection anomalies in the Kuroshio-Oyashio Extension. The latter results from oceanic Rossby waves that are forced by North Pacific Ekman pumping. The SST response patterns to these processes are not orthogonal, and they determine the spatial characteristics of the PDO. The importance of the different forcing processes is frequency dependent. At interannual time scales, forcing from ENSO and the Aleutian low determines the response in equal parts. At decadal time scales, zonal advection in the Kuroshio-Oyashio Extension, ENSO, and anomalies of the Aleutian low each account for similar amounts of the PDO variance. These results support the hypothesis that the PDO is not a dynamical mode, but arises from the superposition of sea surface temperature fluctuations with different dynamical origins.