Purpose. The purposes of the study are to create a new climatic array of thermohaline fields in the Black Sea, to estimate (on its basis) climate changes during the last decades and to compare them with the global climatic tendencies in the World Ocean.

Methods and Results. A new climatic array of thermohaline fields in the Black Sea (MHI-2024) with a spatial grid of 1/6° × 1/4° has been created in Marine Hydrophysical Institute of RAS based on statistical processing of more than 123 thousand hydrological stations for 1950–2023 using optimal interpolation methods. The climate atlas and the digital array are the open access products and can be used in climate studies, mathematical modeling, as well as in solving various applied problems. The deviations of initial data and averaged values from the climatic fields in the MHI-2024 array have constituted a basis for calculating the parameters of temporal variability at different scales and forming the time series of average monthly/annual anomalies. It is revealed that after 2015, sea warming in the 0–100 m layer steadily exceeded the natural background of interannual variability, at that its maximum increase fell on the summer-autumn seasons. Since about 2010–2012, a sharp salinity growth has been observed which does not yet surpass the standard deviation (SD) of interannual variability. The highest salinity increase in the course of a seasonal cycle occurs in spring and autumn when the water balance in the basin is at its maximum.

Conclusions. The Black Sea is related to the areas with the increased rates of climate changes, such as tropical parts of the World Ocean. The high temperature rise in the Black Sea over the past 40 years is the second in intensity as compared to that of the Arctic seas. Salinity growth in the Black Sea over a 70-year period is close to that in the areas of subtropical anticyclonic gyres where sharp salinification, atypical for the ocean, has been observed for the past 20 years. The current warm and saline stage of the Black Sea hydrologic state is similar to the conditions in 1960–1970, but with greater oscillation amplitude. The obtained results have a wide range of applications including formation of general ideas about the carbon cycle mechanisms in the Azov-Black Sea basin.