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[Michaelangelica]

ScienceDaily:

Sea Salt Holds Clues To Climate Change

. .new research coming out of the United Kingdom (U.K.) suggests that the amount of salt in seawater is varying in direct response to man-made climate change.. . .
human-induced climate change could be responsible for rises in salinity that have been recorded in the subtropical regions of the Atlantic Ocean, areas at latitudes immediately north and south of Earth’s tropics
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Salinity levels are important for two reasons.

• First, along with temperature, they directly affect seawater density (salty water is denser than freshwater) and therefore the circulation of ocean currents from the tropics to the poles. These currents control how heat is carried within the oceans and ultimately regulate the world’s climate.
• Second, sea surface salinity is intimately linked to Earth’s overall water cycle and to how much freshwater leaves and enters the oceans through evaporation and precipitation

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Artist's illustration of the Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft, scheduled for launch in May 2010. It will be the first NASA instrument to measure sea salinity from space. (Credit: NASA/JPL)

Lagerloef and Sen are, respectively, principal investigator and project manager of Aquarius, part of a brand new satellite mission due to be launched into orbit in May 2010. Aquarius is the first NASA instrument designed to track sea salinity from space
. . .“With our instruments we will be able to measure salinity to an accuracy of 0.2 psu,” explains Sen, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “If you take half a gallon of water and put a pinch of salt in it, that’s about 0.2 psu.
We will be able to detect that from space, while flying about 650 kilometers [about 404 miles] above Earth.”

Sea Salt Holds Clues To Climate Change