Abstract
We compute the interannual fluctuations of the surface heat budget of the North Atlantic using the trimmed monthly summaries of the Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere DataSet (COADS) for the period 1950–1979. The presence of long-period trends in the heat budget imply large variations of the northward cross-equatorial heat transport over the years. To assess the reliability of these variations, we compare the COADS climate signal to that derived from the ocean weather stations (OWSs) of the North Atlantic. The sea surface temperature, air temperature and sea level pressure show good correlation between the anomaly time series derived from the merchant ship monthly summaries of COADS, and those derived from OWS monthly summaries, except for northernmost locations during winter. In contrast, the sensible and latent heat parameters, which require simultaneous measurements of various variables, have merchant ships and ocean weather stations anomaly time series that are poorly correlated. Only in heavily travelled latitudes and during winter, when the air-sea heat exchange anomalies are large, are the merchant ship measurements able to reproduce the interannual fluctuations of the heat fluxes. The long-period trends in the surface heat budget of North Atlantic equatorward of 40° N implied by COADS thus appear unrepresentative of true climate trends. The COADS trends result from a gradual increase in the magnitude of the reported winds over the years due probably to variations in the ratio of measured to estimated winds, as well as from long period fluctuations in the near surface vertical temperature and humidity gradients.
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Michaud, R., Lin, C.A. Monthly summaries of merchant ship surface marine observations and implications for climate variability studies. Climate Dynamics 7, 45–55 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00204821
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00204821