Observing system requirements for measuring high-frequency air–sea fluxes in the Southern Ocean
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1.
University of Washington
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2.
California Institute of Technology
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3.
University of Gothenburg
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4.
University of California, San Diego
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5.
University of Cape Town
Abstract
Southern Ocean air–sea fluxes are a critical component of the climate system but are historically undersampled due to the remoteness of the region. While much focus has been placed on interannual flux variability, it has become increasingly clear that high-frequency fluctuations, driven by processes like storms and (sub-)mesoscale eddies, play a nonnegligible role in longer-term changes. Therefore, collecting high-resolution in situ flux observations is crucial to better understand the dynamics operating at these scales, as well as their larger-scale impacts. Technological advancements, including the development of new uncrewed surface vehicles, provide the opportunity to increase sampling at small scales. However, determining where and when to deploy such vehicles is not trivial. This study, conceived by the Air–Sea Fluxes working group of the Southern Ocean Observing System, aims to characterize the statistics of high-frequency air–sea flux variability. Using statistical analyses of atmospheric reanalysis data, numerical model output, and mooring observations, we show that there are regional and seasonal variations in the magnitude and sign of storm- and eddy-driven air–sea flux anomalies, which can help guide the planning of field campaigns and deployment of uncrewed surface vehicles in the Southern Ocean.
Copyright and License
Copyright © 2025, by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Funding
CJP was funded by a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award. SS and MDdP have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe ERC Synergy Grant programme under grant agreement No. 101118693 (WHIRLS), and from the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under grant agreement No. 821001 (SO-CHIC). SS is also supported by a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship (WAF 2015.0186) and the Swedish Research Council (VR 2019-04400). STG and MRM were supported by NSF award OPP-1936222 to the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project. STG also received support from NASA MEASURES program award 80NSSC24M0010 and from NASA’s Earth System Explorers program contract 80GSFC24CA067.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to the Southern Ocean Fluxes (SOFLUX) and Observing System Design (OSD) Capability Working Groups of the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS) for motivating this work. We would also like to acknowledge the enormous effort it takes to deploy, recover and maintain the Southern Ocean Flux Station (SOFS) mooring. Finally, thanks to Ivy Frenger for compiling several eddy tracking algorithms and making the code publicly available (see Data Accessibility Statement).
Supplemental Material
The supplemental files for this article can be found as follows:
- soflux_supplementary- pdf file
Data Availability
All data used in this study are publicly available. Air–sea heat fluxes from the ERA5 reanalysis are available at http://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/, CCMP winds are available at http://remss.com/measurements/ccmp/, NOAA OI SST Version 2 is available at http://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.oisst.v2.highres.html, SLA from the Copernicus Marine Service altimetry product is available at http://doi.org/10.48670/moi-00148, SOFS mooring data is available at http://researchdata.edu.au/imos-deep-water-delayed-mode/959767, and B-SOSE output is available at http://sose.ucsd.edu. The eddy tracking code is available at http://github.com/jfaghm/OceanEddies.
Contributions
- Contributed to conception and design: CJP, MDdP, MRM, SS, STG.
- Contributed to analysis and interpretation of data: All authors.
- Drafted and/or revised the article: CJP with input from all authors.
- Approved the submitted version for publication: All authors.
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Additional details
- Accepted
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2025-01-31Accepted
- Caltech groups
- Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)
- Publication Status
- Published