edu.ucar.opensky::articles:22461 UCAR/NCAR - Library OpenSky Support PO Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307-3000 opensky@ucar.edu http://opensky.ucar.edu/ homepage pointOfContact 2025-12-25T15:36:33.718993 ISO 19115-2 Geographic Information - Metadata - Part 2: Extensions for Imagery and Gridded Data ISO 19115-2:2009(E) https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d73j3h2t Air–sea turbulent heat fluxes in climate models and observational analyses: What drives their variability? 2019-04-01T00:00:00Z publication https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d73j3h2t https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0576.1 Small, R. Justin author Bryan, Frank O. author Bishop, S. P. author Tomas, Robert A. author UCAR/NCAR - Library publisher 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 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 degrees or less leads to ocean forcing of heat fluxes over most of the globe. All observational analyses examined (1 degrees OAFlux; 0.25 degrees J-OFURO3; 0.25 degrees SeaFlux) show this general behavior. A standard resolution (1 degrees) climate model fails to reproduce the midlatitude, small-scale ocean forcing of heat flux: refining the ocean grid to resolve eddies (0.1 degrees) 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. UCAR/NCAR - Library OpenSky Support PO Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307-3000 opensky@ucar.edu http://opensky.ucar.edu/ homepage pointOfContact PDF Text theme Resource Type 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z publication Copyright 2019 American Meteorological Society. None eng geoscientificInformation