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Persistent warming and water cycle change due to anthropogenic climate change modifies the temperature and salinity distribution of the ocean over time. This “forced” signal of temperature and salinity change is often masked by the background internal variability of the climate system. Analyzing temperature and salinity change in water-mass-based coordinate systems has been proposed as an alternative to traditional Eulerian (e.g., fixed-depth, zonally averaged) coordinate systems. The impact of internal variability is thought to be reduced in water-mass coordinates, enabling a cleaner separation of the forced signal from background variability—or a higher “signal-to-noise” ratio. Building on previous analyses comparing Eulerian and water-mass-based one-dimensional coordinates, here we recast two-dimensional coordinate systems—temperature–salinity ( T – S …