2009/10/12

Oceans as temperature controllers

Re: tallbloke (#41),
I believe this is due to the long solar minimum. When the sunspot count is above 40 or so, the oceans are net gainers of solar heat energy. When the sun is quiet for a while, that energy makes it's way back to the surface and is released. The last five solar minima have been followed within 12 months by an el nino.


Are you also posting as Stephen Wilde on the wuwt blog? You seem to be pushing the same ideas!.

SW radiation penetrates sea water further than LW radiation. However, this does not mean that SW radiation penetrates 20m of water suddenly transferring all its energy at that depth. It is progressively absorbed on the way down until at depth there is no more SW radiation left. So IR heats the surface only, UV heats the surface mainly. Air in contact with this sea surface is rapidly heated by the water and the water cools fractionally ONLY if the air temp is less than the water temp. If the water temp is less than the air temp (as it is during the daylight hours - usually) then the air will be cooled and the water warmed very fractionally.

The water temperature varies on a yearly basis round the UK (I assume it does round the rest of the globe?) There is no year long lag in temperature fluctuation as seasons change (perhaps only a month??)

My question to you is the same as it has been to Mr. Wilde - how is the ocean going to store this heat over many years as you suggest and then release it to the atmosphere?

Deep water more than 900m is at 4C 700 m averages 12C and at the surface 22C at an air temp of ????
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Water/temp.html&edu=high

If the heat is stored in the upper layers then it is continuously losing the "heat" to COOLER air
If it is in layers below 900m then how is 4C water going to up-well to release heat stored at 4C to air at 5C(for example)

Assuming it were possible to get heat energy stored at 4C to transfer the energy to the air at 12C how do you prevent these heat storage layer mixing as the sea slops around for 5 to 10 years?.

I would agree that the oceans act as a big temperature smoothing "capacitor" Reducing the yearly variations. Much more than this I need a better physical explanation for, please.

A further point AMO is often implicated in controlling air temperatures. This was posted on wuwt:
Comparing AMO with Hadcrut3V and Hadcrut3NH there is a wonderful correlation not so good with CET:



Apart from the increased trend caused by ?something? All the slow humps and dips appear in the right places and even the rapid changes appear aligned (to the eye!)

So if we zoom in and look at the signals through a much longer moving average the dips again align.



The dips in HADCRUT seem to occur a few months ahead of AMO and the peaks are a bit off. Not sure what CET has little correlation but hey, there must be a connection.
If Air Temp is driving AMO then one would expect the air temp changes to occur before AMO
and
Vice Versa.

So now lets look at the same date range through shorter moving averages.



Now it becomes interesting. sometimes the air temp leads amo and sometimes amo leads air temp.

If amo drives temp then there is no way that amo can lag air temperature.
and
vice versa

To me this says that there is a external driver, or the data is faulty.

Any thoughts?

Stuff:
Some interseting stuff but not too useful:

http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/JO/JOSJ/pdf/2601/26010052.pdf
http://science.jrank.org/pages/4836/Ocean-Zones-Water-depth-vs-light-penetration.html
http://spg.ucsd.edu/People/Mati/2003_Vasilkov_et_al_UV_radiation_SPIE.pdf
interesting book (full)
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/PDF_files/book.pdf

This is the one for wavelength and penetration depth in ocean:
http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/JO/JOSJ/pdf/2906/29060257.pdf

IR whacks the water molecules into motion UV less so - check the absoption bands of water vapour.

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