Abstract
Compared with observations, the simulated upper ocean heat content (OHC) determined from climate models shows an underestimation bias. The simulation bias of the average annual water temperature in the upper 300 m is 0.2°C lower than the observational results. The results from our two numerical experiments, using a CMIP5 model, show that the non-breaking surface wave-induced vertical mixing can reduce this bias. The enhanced vertical mixing increases the OHC in the global upper ocean (65°S–65°N). Using non-breaking surface wave-induced vertical mixing reduced the disparity by 30% to 0.14°C. The heat content increase is not directly induced by air-sea heat fluxes during the simulation period, but is the legacy of temperature increases in the first 150 years. During this period, additional vertical mixing was initially included in the climate model. The non-breaking surface wave-induced vertical mixing improves the OHC by increasing the air-sea heat fluxes in the first 150 years. This increase in air-sea heat fluxes warms the upper ocean by 0.05–0.06°C. The results show that the incorporation of vertical mixing induced by nonbreaking surface waves in our experiments can improve the simulation of OHC in the global upper ocean.
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Data Availability Statement
Data supporting this article are available by any users from http://data.fio.org.cn/qiaofl/CSY-JGR-2018.
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Supported by the International Cooperation Project on the China-Australia Research Centre for Maritime Engineering of Ministry of Science and Technology, China (No. 2016YFE0101400), the Basic Scientific Fund for National Public Research Institutes of China (No. 2018S03), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41821004, 41776038), the NSFC-Shandong Joint Fund for Marine Science Research Centers (No. U1606405), the International Cooperation Project of Indo-Pacific Ocean Environment Variation and Air-Sea Interaction (No. GASI-IPOVAI-05), the IOC/WESTPAC OFS Project, the AoShan Talents Cultivation Excellent Scholar Program Supported by Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (No. 2017ASTCP-ES04), and the China-Korea Cooperation Project on the Prediction of North-West Pacific Climate Change
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Chen, S., Qiao, F., Huang, C. et al. Contribution of surface wave-induced vertical mixing to heat content in global upper ocean. J. Ocean. Limnol. 38, 307–313 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00343-019-9003-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00343-019-9003-2