'Southern Ocean' in State of the Climate in 2022

The Southern Ocean (SO) has an important role in Earth’s global climate. It is a significant sink for anthropogenic CO2 and heat (Gille 2002; Frölicher et al. 2015; Shi et al. 2018) and is the world’s most biologically productive ocean (Liu and Curry 2010). The SO is changing rapidly, exhibiting significant warming to the north of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC; Armour et al. 2016; Sallée 2018; Shi et al. 2021), as well as freshening (Swart et al. 2018) and decreasing oxygen (Shepherd et al. 2017). Here we analyze 2022 anomalies of SO sea-surface temperature (SST), surface salinity, mixed layer properties, air–sea heat fluxes, ocean heat content (OHC), surface chlorophyll, and oxygen concentrations. For surface chlorophyll and oxygen, we focus on austral spring 2021 and summer 2021/22 to highlight the phytoplankton growth season.