Posted by Art Miller on November 09, 2000 at 14:47:16:
It is interesting to note that (in a paper in preparation),
N. Schneider and I have examined the heat budget
of SST in the KOE for the
Latif-Barnett mode (the ECHO2 140 yr coupled run)
and found that vertical mixing effects drive the SST
and surface heat fluxes damp it. The forcing is
due to the thermocline rising and falling on the
decadal time scale (in response to basin-scale
Ekman pumping forcing) resulting in differences in the strength
of vertical entrainment of heat into the surface layer.
As the SST is created it also vents heat to the
atmosphere (evidenced especially clearly by the local
precipitation).
The poster here (and also Qiu's poster) suggests alternatively
that horizontal geostrophic advection drives the
KOE SST budget. The model we examined may be too coarse
(2.8 deg resolution) to properly model the effects
of advection, or the model heat budget for SST
(consisting of a single vertical grid point at 10m) may
be better described if integrated over some mixed layer
depth.