Georgia Institute of Technology Ocean Science and Engineering - OSE

The project aims at further testing a new approach, the maximum entropy production (MEP) model of surface heat fluxes (Wang et al, 2014), for modeling and monitoring air-sea exchange of water and heat air-sea water and heat. Compared to the classical methods such as bulk transfer model, the MEP model has several advantages: (1) closing the surface energy budgets at all time and space scales through constraining surface turbulent and conductive heat fluxes by radiation fluxes, (2) allowing the heat fluxes to be derived from only remote sensing observations; (3) parsimony of model input and parameter, (4) independent of bulk gradient variables, and (5) avoiding the explicit use of wind speed and surface roughness as model parameters. The MEP model has been extensively tested against in-situ land observations and also shown to be a promising new remote sensing retrieval algorithm of surface meteorological variables (Moghim et al, 2015). The MEP model predicts air-sea fluxes (turbulent latent, sensible and conductive water/snow/ice heat) using only existing surface solar, long-wave radiation fluxes and sea surface temperature (SST) (and snow/ice surface temperature over Antarctic snow/ice and Arctic sea ice). The MPE model facilitates parameterization of surface fluxes not only for oceans but also for snow-ice covered Antarctica and Arctic) for the climatic assessment of ocean heat budgets needed for the analysis of heat transport in the oceans, sea ice layers and glaciers.