The role of deep sea heat storage in the secular response to climatic forcing

作者：Martin I. Hoffert, Andrew J. Callegari, Ching‐Tzong Hsieh · 发表于：Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres · 年份：1980 · DOI：10.1029/jc085ic11p06667 · 被引用次数：221 · 研究领域：Climate variability and models、Oceanographic and Atmospheric Processes、Geology and Paleoclimatology Research

The influence of the world oceans on climatic response is considered here with emphasis on the heat transferred to waters beneath the well‐mixed surface layer and to polar bottom water forming zones. An upwelling‐diffusing model is formulated to treat this problem whose effective transport properties are calibrated from the steady state vertical profiles of radiocarbon, potential temperature and other tracers measured by chemical oceanographers. The key issue with regard to the question of atmospheric temperature response to external climatic forcing is whether heat is exchanged between the surface mixed layer and deep sea at rates comparable to heat transfer rates between the planetary radiation field and the atmosphere‐mixed layer system. An important model parameter appearing in the analysis is the polar sea warming coefficient ∏ equal to the rate of change of polar sea temperature relative to changes in areally averaged mixed layer temperature. For ∏ values in the range of 0 to 2 the models predicts response times in the range of 8 to 20 years to attain 63% of the equilibrium temperature change for a step function climatic forcing, and 50 to 1000 years to get 90% of the equilibrium response. These may be compared with the roughly 4 year response time one gets with an oceanic mixed layer only model. To study the carbon dioxide climate problem, a more realistic time‐dependent forcing function is used based on the historical growth of fossil fuel CO2 and a logarithmic scalin...