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 Borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is ...

and eastern

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or approximately 20% of the water area of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia (continent), ...

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 Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in Global surface temperature, global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. Climate variability and change, Climate change in ...

in response to increased carbon emissions from

fossil fuel A fossil fuel is a flammable carbon compound- or hydrocarbon-containing material formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the buried remains of prehistoric organisms (animals, plants or microplanktons), a process that occurs within geolog ...

burning. The warm pool nearly doubled in size, from an area of 22 million km² during 1900–1980, to an area of 40 million km² during 1981–2018; however, latest research suggests that this expansion rate may be overestimated. This expansion of the warm pool has allowed more

cyclone 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 ant ...

s 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.

References

Regional climate effects Tropical meteorology {{meteorology-stub

See also

References