Decomposing the meridional heat transport in the climate system

Bjerknes compensation in the Bergen Climate Model

“…In PW at 40 S. They also examined the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis where they found a peak atmospheric heat transport of around 5 PW in the Northern Hemisphere. While this is more comparable to the peak transports found in ECHAM5 by Jungclaus and Koenigk (2010), which exceeded 5 PW at 41 N, it is appreciably larger than the 3.8 PW peak found in HadCM3 (Van Der Swaluw et al 2007), and is comparable to the 4.5 PW peak found CESM 1.0 by Yang et al (2015). The mean ocean heat transport in the BCM reaches a maximum of 2.2 PW at 17 N. This is higher than the 1.4 PW in HadCM3, 1.6 PW in ECMWF, 1.8 PW in CESM 1.0, and 2.1 PW in NCEP/NCAR (Van Der Swaluw et al 2007;Trenberth and Caron 2001;Yang et al 2015).…”

“…While this is more comparable to the peak transports found in ECHAM5 by Jungclaus and Koenigk (2010), which exceeded 5 PW at 41 N, it is appreciably larger than the 3.8 PW peak found in HadCM3 (Van Der Swaluw et al 2007), and is comparable to the 4.5 PW peak found CESM 1.0 by Yang et al (2015). The mean ocean heat transport in the BCM reaches a maximum of 2.2 PW at 17 N. This is higher than the 1.4 PW in HadCM3, 1.6 PW in ECMWF, 1.8 PW in CESM 1.0, and 2.1 PW in NCEP/NCAR (Van Der Swaluw et al 2007;Trenberth and Caron 2001;Yang et al 2015). In ECHAM5, the oceanic heat transport into the Arctic was almost entirely confined to the Atlantic sector where it reached 1.2 PW, and again the ocean heat transport in BCM is higher (Jungclaus and Koenigk 2010).…”

“…They found freshening the North Atlantic caused the Southern Hemisphere to warm leading to a shift in the atmospheric heat transport through atmospheric cells. A follow-up paper by Yang et al (2015) decomposed the heat transports in the atmosphere and ocean into individual components. They confirmed that the atmospheric and oceanic heat transports showed significant anti-correlation, but this was not investigated further in their study.…”

Roles of energy conservation and climate feedback in Bjerknes compensation: a coupled modeling study

“…Here, we would like to emphasize that the OHT and AHT in Fig. 3 are calculated directly from the VT approach (Yang et al 2015a), instead of indirectly using the heat flux budgets at the ocean surface and at the TOA. This assures the independence of AHT and OHT.…”

“…The CTRL starts from the rest with standard configurations (http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/experiments/cesm1.0/). The model climate as a whole reaches quasi-equilibrium after 1000 years of integration (Yang et al 2015a). In the wind-perturbation runs, the surface wind stress in the ocean model is multiplied by a factor of 0.1 (Fig.…”