Ocean submesoscales as a key component of the global heat budget
Abstract
Recent studies highlight that oceanic motions associated with horizontal scales smaller than 50 km, defined here as submesoscales, lead to anomalous vertical heat fluxes from colder to warmer waters. This unique transport property is not captured in climate models that have insufficient resolution to simulate these submesoscale dynamics. Here, we use an ocean model with an unprecedented resolution that, for the first time, globally resolves submesoscale heat transport. Upper-ocean submesoscale turbulence produces a systematically-upward heat transport that is five times larger than mesoscale heat transport, with winter-time averages up to 100 W/m^2 for mid-latitudes. Compared to a lower-resolution model, submesoscale heat transport warms the sea surface up to 0.3 °C and produces an upward annual-mean air–sea heat flux anomaly of 4–10 W/m^2 at mid-latitudes. These results indicate that submesoscale dynamics are critical to the transport of heat between the ocean interior and the atmosphere, and are thus a key component of the Earth's climate.
Additional Information
© 2018 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received: 26 September 2017; Accepted: 09 January 2018; Published online: 22 February 2018. This research was carried out, in part, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Support was provided by the Cryospheric Sciences, Physical Oceanography, and Modeling, Analysis, and Prediction (MAP) programs. Additionally, Z.S. received support from the NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) fellowship. P.K. received support from CNRS (France), LabexMer (ANR-10-LABX-19-01) as well as of the NASA-CNES SWOT mission. J.W. is supported by the NASA-CNES SWOT mission. A.F.T. is supported by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and NASA grant NNX16AG42G. Computations were carried out at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facilities. Author Contributions: Z.S. and P.K. planned the research and wrote the manuscript. Z.S. did the analyses. D.M. conducted the numerical simulation. J.W., A.F.T., and D.M. contributed to interpretation of the results and improving the manuscript. The authors declare no competing financial interests.Attached Files
Published - s41467-018-02983-w.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2018_2983_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
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Additional details
Identifiers
- PMCID
- PMC5823912
- Eprint ID
- 84918
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20180222-100922452
Funding
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- NASA Postdoctoral Program
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
- Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (ANR)
- ANR-10-LABX-19-01
- David and Lucille Packard Foundation
- NASA
- NNX16AG42G
Dates
- Created
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2018-02-22Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-03-17Created from EPrint's last_modified field