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Abstract Ocean warming patterns are a primary control on regional sea level rise and transient climate sensitivity. However, controls on these patterns in both observations and models are not fully understood, complicated as they are by their dependence on the “addition” of heat to the ocean’s interior along background ventilation pathways and on the “redistribution” of heat between regions by changing ocean dynamics. While many previous studies attribute heat redistribution to changes in high-latitude processes, here we propose that substantial heat redistribution is explained by the large-scale adjustment of the geostrophic flow to warming within the pycnocline. We explore this hypothesis in the University of Victoria Earth System Model, estimating added heat using the transport matrix method. We find that throughout the midlatitudes, subtropics, and tropics, patterns of added and redistributed heat in the model are strongly anticorrelated ( R ≈ −0.75). We argue that this occurs because changes in ocean currents, acting across pre-existing temperature gradients, redistribute heat away from regions of strong passive heat convergence. Over broad scales, this advective response can be estimated from changes in upper-ocean density alone using the thermal wind relation and is linked to an adjustment of the subtropical pycnocline. These results highlight a previously unappreciated relationship between added and redistributed heat and emphasize the role that subtropical and midlatitude dynamics play in setting patterns of ocean heat storage. Significance Statement The point of our study was to better understand the geographic pattern of ocean warming caused by human-driven climate change. Warming patterns are challenging to predict because they are sensitive both to how the ocean absorbs heat from the atmosphere and to how ocean currents change in response to increased emissions. We showed that these processes are not independent of one another: in many regions, changes in ocean currents reduce regional variations in the build-up of new heat absorbed from the atmosphere. This finding may help to constrain future projections of regional ocean warming, which matters because ocean warming patterns have a major influence on regional sea level rise, marine ecosystem degradation, and the rate of atmospheric warming.
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Steric Sea Level Rise and Relationships with Model Drift and Water Mass Representation in GFDL CM4 and ESM4
Abstract Density-driven steric seawater changes are a leading-order contributor to global mean sea level rise. However, intermodel differences in the magnitude and spatial patterns of steric sea level rise exist at regional scales and often emerge during the spinup and preindustrial control integrations of climate models. Steric sea level results from an eddy-permitting climate model, GFDL CM4, are compared with a lower-resolution counterpart, GFDL-ESM4. The results from both models are examined through basin-scale heat budgets and watermass analysis, and we compare the patterns of ocean heat uptake, redistribution, and sea level differ in ocean-only [i.e., Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (OMIP)] and coupled climate configurations. After correcting for model drift, both GFDL CM4 and GFDL-ESM4 simulate nearly equivalent ocean heat content change and global sea level rise during the historical period. However, the GFDL CM4 model exhibits as much as a 40% increase in surface ocean heat uptake in the Southern Ocean and subsequent increases in horizontal export to other ocean basins after bias correction. The results suggest regional differences in the processes governing Southern Ocean heat export, such as the formation of Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW), Subpolar Mode Water (SPMW), and gyre transport between the two models, and that sea level changes in these models cannot be fully bias-corrected. Since the process-level differences between the two models are evident in the preindustrial control simulations of both models, these results suggest that the control simulations are important for identifying and correcting sea level–related model biases.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2332379
- PAR ID:
- 10626711
- Publisher / Repository:
- AMS
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Climate
- Volume:
- 37
- Issue:
- 24
- ISSN:
- 0894-8755
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 6563 to 6583
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-23-0591.1
