Energetics of ocean circulation models

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Ocean circulation plays a key role in the earth's climate system. Relevant to the work proposed here, it redistributes heat, provides an important boundary condition for the atmosphere and provides a sink for atmospheric CO2. There is a growing awareness in the oceanographic community that knowledge of a very fundamental aspect of ocean circulation is lacking: we do not understand its energetics. This has practical implications (e.g., to climate modelling) in that the response of these models to changes in forcing are likely dependent on model energetics. For example, although a coupled atmosphere-ocean model may be tuned to adequately reproduce current conditions, its response to changes in atmospheric composition will likely differ from that of the actual coupled system if the model energetics do not reflect those of the actual system.