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Global ship-based programs, with highly accurate, full water column physical and biogeochemical observations repeated decadally since the 1970s, provide a crucial resource for documenting ocean change. The ocean, a central component of Earth's climate system, is taking up most of Earth's excess anthropogenic heat, with about 19% of this excess in the abyssal ocean beneath 2,000 m, dominated by Southern Ocean warming. The ocean also has taken up about 27% of anthropogenic carbon, resulting in acidification of the upper ocean. Increased stratification has resulted in a decline in oxygen and increase in nutrients in the Northern Hemisphere thermocline and an expansion of tropical oxygen minimum zones. Southern Hemisphere thermocline oxygen increased in the 2000s owing to stronger wind forcing and ventilation. The most recent decade of global hydrography has mapped dissolved organic carbon, a large, bioactive reservoir, for the first time and quantified its contribution to export production (∼20%) and deep-ocean oxygen utilization. Ship-based measurements also show that vertical diffusivity increases from a minimum in the thermocline to a maximum within the bottom 1,500 m, shifting our physical paradigm of the ocean's overturning circulation.

With radar interferometry, the next-generation Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite mission will improve the measured sea surface height resolution down to 15 km, allowing us to investigate for the first time the global upper ocean variability at the submesoscale range. Here, by analysing shipboard Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler measurements along 137°E in the northwest Pacific of 2004–2016, we show that the observed upper ocean velocities are comprised of balanced geostrophic flows and unbalanced internal waves. The transition length scale, Lt, separating these two motions, is found to depend strongly on the energy level of local mesoscale eddy variability. In the eddy-abundant western boundary current region of Kuroshio, Lt can be shorter than 15 km, whereas Lt exceeds 200 km along the path of relatively stable North Equatorial Current. Judicious separation between the geostrophic and internal wave signals represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission.

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estimates of CO 2 flux are sensitive to the rates of pCO 2 s increase used to constrain the long-term pCO 2 s change for each sub-region.