SOFIA · Southern Ocean fine-scale ocean dynamics and storm impacts on air-sea heat exchange

Climate mitigation relies on accurate knowledge of Earth’s energy distribution, which informs us about the extent, rate, and locations of climate warming. Historically, the ocean has played a dominant role, absorbing 93% of the excess heat generated by human activities through the air-sea interface. Ocean heat content trends obtained from sparse observations show the Southern Ocean dominates this heat uptake. Climate models confirm this, indicating the Southern Ocean accounts for 75–83% of the global ocean heat uptake. However, inter-model comparisons show discrepancies in ocean heat uptake by 40% that arise from misrepresentation of high-latitude winds and poor parametrization of vertical heat transport induced by fine-scale (1–100 km) ocean circulation. The goal of SOFIA is to understand and quantify the dominant processes that are responsible for moving heat between the atmosphere and ocean interior, thereby advancing climate understanding and predictability. I hypothesize that the ocean-atmosphere heat exchange across the Southern Ocean is set by immense and turbulent storms, while the vertical transport of heat between the surface ocean and interior is strongly regulated by fine-scale ocean fronts, eddies and filaments located in regions of high eddy kinetic energy. I will investigate the role of these processes in heat exchange dynamics by integrating a state-of-the-art coupled ocean-atmosphere model simulation with novel in-situ data from the remote Southern Ocean using innovative autonomous ocean observing technologies. Using high-resolution ocean altimetry data from the newly launched Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission, I will reconstruct circumpolar maps of vertical ocean transport, advancing our global understanding and predictability of ocean heat uptake in response to climate variability and change.