Unexpected impacts of the Tropical Pacific array on reanalysis surface meteorology and heat fluxes
Date
2014-09-03Author
Josey, Simon A.
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Yu, Lisan
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Gulev, Sergey
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Jin, Xiangze
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Tilinina, N.
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Barnier, B.
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Brodeau, L.
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Metadata
Show full item recordCitable URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1912/6944As published
https://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL061302DOI
10.1002/2014GL061302Keyword
Tropical Pacific; Heat flux; Mooring array; ReanalysisAbstract
The Tropical Pacific mooring array has been a key component of the climate observing system since the early 1990s. We identify a pattern of strong near surface humidity anomalies, colocated with the array, in the widely used European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting Interim atmospheric reanalysis. The pattern generates large, previously unrecognized latent and net air-sea heat flux anomalies, up to 50 Wm−2 in the annual mean, in reanalysis derived data sets employed for climate studies (TropFlux) and ocean model forcing (the Drakkar Forcing Set). As a consequence, uncertainty in Tropical Pacific ocean heat uptake between the 1990s and early 2000s at the mooring sites is significant with mooring colocated differences in decadally averaged ocean heat uptake as large as 20 Wm−2. Furthermore, these results have major implications for the dual use of air-sea flux buoys as reference sites and sources of assimilation data that are discussed.
Description
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 41 (2014): 6213–6220, doi:10.1002/2014GL061302.
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Geophysical Research Letters 41 (2014): 6213–6220Related items
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