News: Ocean surface forcing and surface fields

Bernard Barnier (1) , Laurent Brodeau (1) , Thierry Penduff (1)

1 LEGI - Laboratoire des Écoulements Géophysiques et Industriels [Grenoble]

Exchanges of energy and water occurring at the air-sea interface establish links and feedbacks between the atmosphere and the ocean, and are key processes in the climate and weather systems. There are great needs in climate and oceanographic research for high quality estimates of large scale fluxes of heat, freshwater and momentum. There has been substantial progress in our knowledge of the ocean surface fluxes in recent years. Nevertheless, new challenges have emerged, stimulated by the use of eddy-resolving ocean general circulation models (OGCMs) to investigate the ocean decadal variability and by the rapid development of operational oceanography. The state of our knowledge in the field of air-sea exchanges of energy and water is comprehensively covered in the report on air-sea fluxes from the WCRP working group (1). For in-depth considerations on the need of surface fluxes in operational ocean analysis and forecasting systems, we recommend the book chapter by W. Large (2).

Domaines: Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]; Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]

Bernard Barnier, Laurent Brodeau, Thierry Penduff. News: Ocean surface forcing and surface fields. Mercator Ocean Quarterly Newsletter, 2006, 22. ⟨hal-00248168⟩