Identification

Title

Insights into Earth's energy imbalance from multiple sources

Abstract

The current Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) can best be estimated from changes in ocean heat content (OHC), complemented by top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation measurements and an assessment of the small non-ocean components. Sustained observations from the Argo array of autonomous profiling floats enable near-global estimates of OHC since 2005, which reveal considerable cancellation of variations in the upper 300 m. An analysis of the monthly contributions to EEI from non-ocean components (land and ice) using the Community Earth System Model (CESM) Large Ensemble reveals standard deviations of 0.3–0.4 W m−2 (global); largest values occur in August, but values are below 0.75 W m−2 greater than 95% of the time. Global standard deviations of EEI of 0.64 W m−2 based on top-of-atmosphere observations therefore substantially constrain ocean contributions, given by the tendencies of OHC. Instead, monthly standard deviations of many Argo-based OHC tendencies are 6–13 W m−2, and nonphysical fluctuations are clearly evident. It is shown that an ocean reanalysis with multivariate dynamical data assimilation features much better agreement with TOA radiation, and 44% of the vertically integrated short-term OHC trend for 2005–14 of 0.8 ± 0.2 W m−2 (globally) occurs below 700-m depth. Largest warming occurs from 20° to 50°S, especially over the southern oceans, and near 40°N in all ocean analyses. The EEI is estimated to be 0.9 ± 0.3 W m−2 for 2005–14.

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document

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code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d74b32zb

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

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Classification of spatial data and services

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geoscientificInformation

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title

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reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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publication

effective date

2016-10-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2016 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

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pointOfContact

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