Jia et al. (2025) Ocean Wave Slope Effects on Global Air‐Sea Turbulent Heat Flux

⚠️ Warning: This summary was generated from the abstract only, as the full text was not available.

Identification

• Journal: Geophysical Research Letters
• Year: 2025
• Date: 2025-11-19
• Authors: Chong Jia, Milan Curcic
• DOI: 10.1029/2025gl118617

Research Groups

Not specified in abstract.

Short Summary

This study introduces a geometric correction to standard ocean surface turbulent heat flux algorithms to account for the enhanced surface area due to ocean wave slopes. It finds that the effective air-sea interface is enhanced by approximately 2% on average, leading to mean corrections of 0.29 W/m² for sensible heat flux and 2.34 W/m² for latent heat flux, with statistically significant increasing trends over recent decades.

Objective

• To introduce and apply a geometric correction to ocean surface turbulent heat fluxes (sensible heat flux and latent heat flux) based on the mean square slope of ocean waves, thereby accounting for the enhanced surface area neglected by standard bulk flux algorithms, and to quantify its global impact and long-term trends.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: Global
• Temporal Scale: 1940 to 2024 (85 years)

Methodology and Data

• Models used: Geometric correction based on analytically derived mean square slope (MSS) of ocean waves, applied to standard bulk flux algorithms. MSS corrected for unresolved high-frequency waves.
• Data sources: ERA5 reanalysis data.

Main Results

• The effective air-sea interface area is enhanced by approximately 2% on average due to ocean wave slopes.
• This enhancement leads to mean corrections of 0.29 W/m² for sensible heat flux (SHF) and 2.34 W/m² for latent heat flux (LHF).
• Climatological trends in mean square slope (MSS) and LHF corrections show statistically significant increases over the past several decades.
• These corrections exhibit spatial and seasonal variability.

Contributions

• Introduces a novel geometric correction for ocean surface turbulent heat fluxes (SHF and LHF) that accounts for the enhanced surface area due to ocean wave slopes, improving the accuracy of standard bulk flux algorithms.
• Quantifies the global magnitude and spatiotemporal variability of these corrections on Earth's energy and water budgets.
• Identifies statistically significant increasing trends in MSS and LHF corrections over several decades.
• Highlights the potential cumulative impacts of these corrections on climate simulations, ocean heat content assessments, and flux-dependent satellite retrievals.

Funding

Not specified in abstract.

Citation

@article{Jia2025Ocean,
  author = {Jia, Chong and Curcic, Milan},
  title = {Ocean Wave Slope Effects on Global Air‐Sea Turbulent Heat Flux},
  journal = {Geophysical Research Letters},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1029/2025gl118617},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1029/2025gl118617}
}