SoMAS - Role of Ocean and Atmosphere Variability in Scale Dependent Air Sea Interactions

Lucas Laurindo from the University of Miami speaks to SoMAS at the Topics in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences seminar on November 2, 2022 on the topic "Role of Ocean and Atmosphere variability in scale-dependent Thermodynamic air-sea interactions."

This study investigates the importance of atmospheric processes (weather) and ocean currents in driving variations in sea surface temperature ( SST ) and the air-sea heat exchange at mid-latitudes. Our analysis uses satellite observations, a high-resolution (HR) climate model that resolves ocean currents with dimensions of tens of km, and a low-resolution model (LR) that can only simulate ocean currents with hundreds of km in size. We specifically examine the SST and heat exchange variability resolved by these datasets at horizontal scales between 50 and 10,000 km and time scales from 2 months to 80 years in the Pacific Ocean. Using a simple stochastic climate model to interpret the results, we find that variability at scales larger than 2,000 km is driven predominantly by weather. At smaller scales, SST and heat exchange are more variable in HR than in LR and agree better with satellite observations. We also find that ocean processes drive variability in SST with time scales ranging from 2 months to several decades, similar to those caused by weather, which in turn induces slow variations in the air-sea heat exchange.