Estimating ocean heat content (OHC) with reliable uncertainties is critical for understanding and monitoring the evolution of Earth's climate, as the ocean has stored most of the energy accumulated in the climate system due to Earth Energy Imbalance. Here, we use Argo profiling float data from 2004-2022 to map OHC. As fewer Argo observations are available deeper in the water column, previous studies have partitioned the ocean into at least two pressure layers and mapped each separately, which complicates the estimation of uncertainties when the maps are summed to get the total OHC. In this work, we consider the case of two pressure layers and propose an improved mapping and uncertainty quantification method using bivariate locally stationary Gaussian processes and conditional simulations to map the two sections jointly while accounting for the correlation between them. We find that modeling this correlation results in improved OHC anomaly mapping and up to a 15 percent reduction of global OHC anomaly uncertainties in comparison to mapping the two layers separately without accounting for their dependence. These estimated uncertainties are essential to analyze the statistical significance of OHC anomalies on both regional and global scales, which we demonstrate using several climatological case studies.
Ocean heat content (OHC) dominates Earth’s energy imbalance, but its uncertainty has not been fully understood. Here, we construct a Large-Ensemble to comprehensively quantify the OHC uncertainty from global to regional scales since 1955, and consider eight groups of error sources based on the community’s efforts....
Hui-Feng Yuan, Li-Jing Cheng, Yu-Ying Pan et al.· Nature Communications· 0 citations
Abstract. Accurate initialization of ocean states is essential for skillful prediction of Earth system variability across seasonal-to-decadal timescales. In this study, we evaluate the impact of a newly developed four-dimensional ensemble variational (4DEnVar)-based weakly coupled ocean data assimilation (WCODA) system...
Peng-Fei Shi, L. R. Leung, Zhao-Xia Pu et al.· Geoscientific Model Developm...· 0 citations
The Gulf of Maine (GoM) is among the fastest-warming regions in the global ocean, with an observed basin-wide warming rate of approximately 0.05°C per year, substantially exceeding the global upper-ocean average. Although this accelerated warming has been well documented, the relative contributions of local atmospheric...
Water vapor, as a greenhouse gas, plays a vital role in shaping the Earth's climate. Understanding how water vapor participates in energy and matter transfer over time and space is essential for assessing water resources and forecasting hazardous meteorological events. Reanalysis data provides the most comprehensive as...
Ya.O. Bakhramkhan, D. Ermakov, E. V. Pashinov et al.· Modern problems of remote se...· 0 citations
Global Hydrological Models (GHMs) are an invaluable tool for simulating the dynamics of our freshwater cycle and estimating its contribution to sea level rise. However, uncertainties of input data (e.g., meteorological forcing, water demand estimates) and empirical parameters, as well as errors in the model structure (...
M. Schumacher, Çağatay Çakan, Supriya Tiwari et al.· GRACE/GRACE-FO Science Team...· 0 citations
Water vapor isotopes carry the integrated history of evaporation, condensation, mixing, and transport. Although previous studies have shown potential to improve forecasts under controlled conditions, real-world applications have been limited by systematic biases in both models and satellite retrievals arising from spar...
