Abstract
A coupled atmosphere-ocean model developed at the Institute for Space Studies at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Russell et al., 1995) was used to verify the validity of Haney-type surface thermal boundary condition, which linearly connects net downward surface heat fluxQ to air/sea temperature difference ÎT by a relaxation coefficientk. The model was initiated from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) atmospheric observations for 1 December 1977, and from the National Ocean Data Center (NODC) global climatological mean December temperature and salinity fields at 1°x 1° resolution. The time step is 7.5 minutes. We integrated the model for 450 days and obtained a complete model-generated global data set of daily mean downward net surface fluxQ, surface air temperatureTA, and sea surface temperatureTO. Then, we calculated the cross-correlation coefficients (CCC) betweenQ and ÎT. The ensemble mean CCC fields show (a) no correlation betweenQ and ÎT in the equatiorial regions, and (b) evident correlation (CCCâ„0.7) betweenQ and ÎT in the middle and high latitudes. Additionally, we did the variance analysis and found that whenk=120 W mâ2Kâ1, the two standard deviations, ÏQ and ÏÎșÎŽT, are quite close in the middle and high latitudes. These results agree quite well with a previous research (Chu et al., 1998) on analyzing the NCEP re-analyzed surface data, except that a smaller value ofk (80 W mâ2Kâ1) was found in the previous study.
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