Air–Sea Turbulent Heat Fluxes in Climate Models and Observational Analyses: What Drives Their Variability?
Abstract
A traditional view is that the ocean outside of the tropics responds passively to atmosphere forcing, which implies that air–sea heat fluxes are mainly driven by atmosphere variability. This paper tests this viewpoint using state-of-the-art air–sea turbulent heat flux observational analyses and a climate model run at different resolutions. It is found herein that in midlatitude ocean frontal zones the variability of air–sea heat fluxes is not predominantly driven by the atmosphere variations but instead is forced by sea surface temperature (SST) variations arising from intrinsic oceanic variability. Meanwhile in most of the tropics and subtropics wind is the dominant driver of heat flux variability, and atmosphere humidity is mainly important in higher latitudes. The predominance of ocean forcing of heat fluxes found in frontal regions occurs on scales of around 700 km or less. Spatially smoothing the data to larger scales results in the traditional atmosphere-driving case, while filtering to retain only small scales of 5° or less leads to ocean forcing of heat fluxes over most of the globe. All observational analyses examined (1° OAFlux; 0.25° J-OFURO3; 0.25° SeaFlux) show this general behavior. A standard resolution (1°) climate model fails to reproduce the midlatitude, small-scale ocean forcing ofmore »
- Authors:
-
- National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
- North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); National Science Foundation (NSF)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1505893
- Alternate Identifier(s):
- OSTI ID: 1610893
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0006743; NNX16AH60G; 80NSSC18K0769
- Resource Type:
- Published Article
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Climate
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Name: Journal of Climate Journal Volume: 32 Journal Issue: 8; Journal ID: ISSN 0894-8755
- Publisher:
- American Meteorological Society
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences; Atmosphere-ocean interaction; Boundary currents; Eddies; Fluxes; Ocean models; Oceanic variability
Citation Formats
Small, R. Justin, Bryan, Frank O., Bishop, Stuart P., and Tomas, Robert A. Air–Sea Turbulent Heat Fluxes in Climate Models and Observational Analyses: What Drives Their Variability?. United States: N. p., 2019.
Web. doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0576.1.
Small, R. Justin, Bryan, Frank O., Bishop, Stuart P., & Tomas, Robert A. Air–Sea Turbulent Heat Fluxes in Climate Models and Observational Analyses: What Drives Their Variability?. United States. https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0576.1
Small, R. Justin, Bryan, Frank O., Bishop, Stuart P., and Tomas, Robert A. Tue .
"Air–Sea Turbulent Heat Fluxes in Climate Models and Observational Analyses: What Drives Their Variability?". United States. https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0576.1.
@article{osti_1505893,
title = {Air–Sea Turbulent Heat Fluxes in Climate Models and Observational Analyses: What Drives Their Variability?},
author = {Small, R. Justin and Bryan, Frank O. and Bishop, Stuart P. and Tomas, Robert A.},
abstractNote = {A traditional view is that the ocean outside of the tropics responds passively to atmosphere forcing, which implies that air–sea heat fluxes are mainly driven by atmosphere variability. This paper tests this viewpoint using state-of-the-art air–sea turbulent heat flux observational analyses and a climate model run at different resolutions. It is found herein that in midlatitude ocean frontal zones the variability of air–sea heat fluxes is not predominantly driven by the atmosphere variations but instead is forced by sea surface temperature (SST) variations arising from intrinsic oceanic variability. Meanwhile in most of the tropics and subtropics wind is the dominant driver of heat flux variability, and atmosphere humidity is mainly important in higher latitudes. The predominance of ocean forcing of heat fluxes found in frontal regions occurs on scales of around 700 km or less. Spatially smoothing the data to larger scales results in the traditional atmosphere-driving case, while filtering to retain only small scales of 5° or less leads to ocean forcing of heat fluxes over most of the globe. All observational analyses examined (1° OAFlux; 0.25° J-OFURO3; 0.25° SeaFlux) show this general behavior. A standard resolution (1°) climate model fails to reproduce the midlatitude, small-scale ocean forcing of heat flux: refining the ocean grid to resolve eddies (0.1°) gives a more realistic representation of ocean forcing but the variability of both SST and of heat flux is too high compared to observational analyses.},
doi = {10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0576.1},
journal = {Journal of Climate},
number = 8,
volume = 32,
place = {United States},
year = {Tue Apr 09 00:00:00 EDT 2019},
month = {Tue Apr 09 00:00:00 EDT 2019}
}
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