New improvements for monitoring the Ocean Heat Content and the Earth Energy imbalance (MOHeaCAN).

Abstract

The Earth energy imbalance (EEI) at the top of the atmosphere is responsible for the accumulation of energy in the climate system. While necessary to better understand the Earth’s warming climate, measuring the EEI is challenging as it is a globally integrated variable whose variations are small (0.5-1 W.m−2) compared to the amount of energy entering and leaving the climate system (~ 340 W.m-2). Accuracies better than 0.1 W.m−2 are needed to evaluate the temporal variations of the EEI at decadal and longer time-scales. The CERES experiment provides EEI time variations with a typical uncertainty of ± 0.1 W.m−2 and shows a trend in EEI of 0.50 +/- 0.47 W.m−2 per decade over the period 2005-2019. The combination of space altimetry and space gravimetry measurements provides an estimate of the ocean heat content (OHC) change which is an accurate proxy of EEI (because >90% of the excess of energy stored by the planet in response to the EEI is accumulated in the ocean in the form of heat).  In Marti et al. (2021), the global OHC was estimated at global scales based on the combination of space altimetry and space gravimetry measurements over 2002-2016. Changes in the EEI were then derived with realistic estimates of its uncertainty. Here we present the improvements brought to the global OGC and EEI over an extended period (2002-2021), such as the calculation of the expansion efficiency of heat over the total water column, the improvement of ocean mass solution, the empirical correction of the wet tropospheric correction of Jason-3 altimeter measurements (Barnoud et al., 2022). The space geodetic GOHC-EEI product based on space altimetry and space gravimetry is available on the AVSIO website at https://doi.org/10.24400/527896/a01-2020.003.