On moist ocean-atmosphere coupling mechanisms

Abstract

We investigate mechanisms governing moist energy exchanges at the atmosphere-ocean interface in global Earth system models. The goal of this work is to overcome deficiencies like energy fixers and unphysical thermodynamic formulations and designs that are commonly used in modern models. For example, while the ocean surface evaporation is one of the most significant climatological drivers, its representation in numerical models may not be physically accurate. In particular, existing schemes give an incorrect atmospheric air temperature tendency during evaporation events. To remedy this, starting from first principles, we develop a new mechanism for the ocean-atmosphere moist energy transfers. It utilizes consistent thermodynamics of water species, distributes latent heat of evaporation in a physically plausible way, and avoids reliance on artificial energy fixers. The temperature and water mass tendencies are used to formulate a set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) representing a simple box model of ocean-air exchange. We investigate the properties of the ODEs representing the proposed mechanism and compare them against those derived from the current designs of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The proposed simplified box model highlights the advantages of our approach in capturing physically appropriate atmospheric temperature changes during evaporation while conserving energy.