Air-Sea Heat and Moisture Flux Gradients

Abstract

Air-sea heat and moisture fluxes modulate the surface energy balance and oceanic and atmospheric heat transport across all timescales. Spatial gradients of these fluxes, on a multitude of spatial scales, also have significant impacts on the ocean and atmosphere. Nevertheless, analysis of these gradients, and discussion regarding our ability to represent them, is relatively absent within the community. This letter discusses their importance and presents a wintertime climatology. Their sensitivity to spatiotemporal scale and choice of data set is also examined in the mid-latitudes. A lead-lag analysis illustrates that wintertime air-sea heat flux gradients in the Gulf Stream can precede the North Atlantic Oscillation by ∼1 month. A lack of observations and thus validation of air-sea heat flux gradients represents a significant gap in our understanding of how air-sea processes affect weather and climate, and warrants increased attention from the observational and modeling communities.