Surveys in Geophysics最新文献

As observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow On (GRACE-FO) missions, global terrestrial water storage (TWS), excluding ice sheets and glaciers, declined rapidly between May 2014 and March 2016. By 2023, it had not yet recovered, with the upper end of its range remaining 1 cm equivalent height of water below the upper end of the earlier range. Beginning with a record-setting drought in northeastern South America, a series of droughts on five continents helped to prevent global TWS from rebounding. While back-to-back El Niño events are largely responsible for the South American drought and others in the 2014–2016 timeframe, the possibility exists that global warming has contributed to a net drying of the land since then, through enhanced evapotranspiration and increasing frequency and intensity of drought. Corollary to the decline in global TWS since 2015 has been a rise in barystatic sea level (i.e., global mean ocean mass). However, we find no evidence that it is anything other than a coincidence that, also in 2015, two estimates of barystatic sea level change, one from GRACE/FO and the other from a combination of satellite altimetry and Argo float ocean temperature measurements, began to diverge. Herein, we discuss both the mechanisms that account for the abrupt decline in terrestrial water storage and the possible explanations for the divergence of the barystatic sea level change estimates.

This study uses an oceanic energy budget to estimate the ocean heat transport convergence in the North Atlantic during 2005–2018. The horizontal convergence of the ocean heat transport is estimated using ocean heat content tendency primarily derived from satellite altimetry combined with space gravimetry. The net surface energy fluxes are inferred from mass-corrected divergence of atmospheric energy transport and tendency of the ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis combined with top-of-the-atmosphere radiative fluxes from the clouds and the Earth’s radiant energy system project. The indirectly estimated horizontal convergence of the ocean heat transport is integrated between the rapid climate change-meridional overturning circulation and heatflux array (RAPID) section at 26.5°N (operating since 2004) and the overturning in the subpolar north atlantic program (OSNAP) section, situated at 53°–60°N (operating since 2014). This is to validate the ocean heat transport convergence estimate against an independent estimate derived from RAPID and OSNAP in-situ measurements. The mean ocean energy budget of the North Atlantic is closed to within ± 0.25 PW between RAPID and OSNAP sections. The mean oceanic heat transport convergence between these sections is 0.58 ± 0.25 PW, which agrees well with observed section transports. Interannual variability of the inferred oceanic heat transport convergence is also in reasonable agreement with the interannual variability observed at RAPID and OSNAP, with a correlation of 0.54 between annual time series. The correlation increases to 0.67 for biannual time series. Other estimates of the ocean energy budget based on ocean heat content tendency derived from various methods give similar results. Despite a large spread, the correlation is always significant meaning the results are robust against the method to estimate the ocean heat content tendency.

This study aims to revisit the classic “hot tower” hypothesis proposed by Riehl and Simpson (Malkus) in 1958 and revisited in 1979. Our investigation centers on the convective mass flux of hot towers within the tropical trough zone, using geostationary (GEO) satellite data and an innovative analysis technique, known as ML16, which integrates various data sources, including hot tower heights, ambient profiles, and a plume model, to determine convective mass flux. The GEO-based ML16 approach is evaluated against collocated ground-based radar wind profiler observations, showing broad agreement. Our GEO-based estimate of hot tower convective mass flux, 2.8 × 10¹¹–3.4 × 10¹¹ kg s⁻¹, is similar to the revisited estimate in Riehl and Simpson (1979), 2.6–3.0 × 10¹¹ kg s⁻¹. Additionally, our analysis gives a median count of around 550 hot towers with a median size of about 11 km, in contrast to the previous estimates of 1600–2400 hot towers, each characterized by a fixed size of 5 km. We discuss the causes of these discrepancies, emphasizing the fundamental differences between the two approaches in characterizing tropical hot towers. While both approaches have various uncertainties, the evidence suggests that greater credibility should be placed on results derived from direct satellite observations. Finally, we identify future opportunities in Earth Observations that will provide more accurate measurements, enabling further evaluation of the role played by tropical hot towers in mass transport.

Integral formulas represent a methodological basis for the determination of gravitational fields generated by planetary bodies. In particular, spherical integral transformations are preferred for their symmetrical properties with the integration domain being the entire surface of the sphere. However, global coverage of boundary values is rarely guaranteed. In practical calculations, we therefore split the spherical surface into a near zone and a far zone, for convenience, by a spherical cap. While the gravitational effect in the near zone can be evaluated by numerical integration over available boundary values, the contribution of the far zone has to be precisely quantified by other means. Far-zone effects for the isotropic integral transformations and those depending on the direct azimuth have adequately been discussed. On the other hand, this subject has only marginally been addressed for the spherical integral formulas that are, except for other variables, also functions of the backward azimuth. In this article, we significantly advance the existing geodetic methodology by deriving the far-zone effects for the two classes of spherical integral transformations: (1) the analytical solutions of the horizontal, horizontal–horizontal, and horizontal–horizontal–horizontal BVPs including their generalisations with arbitrary-order vertical derivative of respective boundary conditions and (2) spatial (vertical, horizontal, or mixed) derivatives of these generalised analytical solutions up to the third order. The integral and spectral forms of the far-zone effects are implemented in MATLAB software package, and their consistency is tested in closed-loop simulations. The presented methodology can be employed in upward/downward continuation of potential field observables or for a quantification of error propagation through spherical integral transformations.

In the tropics, deep convection, which is often organized into convective systems, plays a crucial role in the water and energy cycles by significantly contributing to surface precipitation and forming upper-level ice clouds. The arrangement of these deep convective systems, as well as their individual properties, has recently been recognized as a key feature of the tropical climate. Using data from Africa and the tropical Atlantic Ocean as a case study, recent shifts in convective organization have been analyzed through a well-curated, unique record of METEOSAT observations spanning four decades. The findings indicate a significant shift in the occurrence of deep convective systems, characterized by a decrease in large, short-lived systems and an increase in smaller, longer-lived ones. This shift, combined with a nearly constant deep cloud fraction over the same period, highlights a notable change in convective organization. These new observational insights are valuable for refining emerging kilometer-scale climate models that accurately represent individual convective systems but struggle to realistically simulate their overall arrangement.

In this study, we investigate the representation of the global mean energy balance components in 10 atmospheric reanalyses, and compare their magnitudes with recent reference estimates as well as the ones simulated by the latest generation of climate models from the 6th phase of the coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP6). Despite the assimilation of comprehensive observational data in reanalyses, the spread amongst the magnitudes of their global energy balance components generally remains substantial, up to more than 20 Wm⁻² in some quantities, and their consistency is typically not higher than amongst the much less observationally constrained CMIP6 models. Relative spreads are particularly large in the reanalysis global mean latent heat fluxes (exceeding 20%) and associated intensity of the global water cycle, as well as in the energy imbalances at the top-of-atmosphere and surface. A comparison of reanalysis runs in full assimilation mode with corresponding runs constrained only by sea surface temperatures reveals marginal differences in their global mean energy balance components. This indicates that discrepancies in the global energy balance components caused by the different model formulations amongst the reanalyses are hardly alleviated by the imposed observational constraints from the assimilation process. Similar to climate models, reanalyses overestimate the global mean surface downward shortwave radiation and underestimate the surface downward longwave radiation by 3–7 Wm⁻². While reanalyses are of tremendous value as references for many atmospheric parameters, they currently may not be suited to serve as references for the magnitudes of the global mean energy balance components.