The wind work input into the global ocean revealed by a 17-year global HYbrid coordinate ocean model reanalysis

Abstract

A 17-year (1999–2015) HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) reanalysis is used to calculate the wind work to the global oceanic circulation with a focus on the global integral of the wind work on the ageostrophic currents. While the wind work on the geostrophic currents estimate of the study is in good agreement with previous research, our estimation of the wind work on the ageostrophic currents (5.44 TW) is significantly larger than previous estimates. The two main reasons for this difference are: (1) the thickness of HYCOM's first vertical layer is 1 m and thus the surface ageostrophic currents are better represented than those in numerical models that use a thicker top layer; and (2) the reanalysis is forced with hourly surface stresses and thus contains wind work contributions from high frequency wind stress variations compared against previous estimates using daily wind stress.