COMPASS

The Atlantic sector shows climatic variability on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Improved understanding of how the ocean-atmosphere system works in the Atlantic will benefit climate change analysis. Recommendations and priorities for research in the Atlantic are outlined in the U.S.-CLIVAR Atlantic implementation plan. The need to improve estimates of air-sea fluxes and atmospheric re-analyses products, which are widely used to study climatic change in the ocean and the atmosphere are among the top priorities.

Under this project an attempt has been made to obtain all the heat flux components (latent, sensible, and radiative) at the ocean surface of the Atlantic Ocean using multiple satellite sensors. Initially, the fluxes will be generated and provided at weekly and monthly time scales for a three-year period between 45°N and 45°S at 1° resolution, using a wide range satellite observations. These data will be used for methodology development, assessing the quality of fluxes from atmospheric re-analyses, and studying the weekly and monthly surface flux variability in the Atlantic. Methodologies will be developed to derive radiative fluxes from various satellite platforms including the most recent ones, to establish limits on attainable accuracies. Such information will provide a bridge between the longer observational records of NOAA/NASA Pathfinder data, periods when newer systems are available, and future time series of radiative fluxes from various centers in the United States and in Europe.

Several participants in a project related Mini Workshop, University of Maryland (from left: Yingtao Ma, Tony Santorelli, Abderrahim Bentamy, Kristina Katsaros, Jim Carton, Rachel Pinker, Alberto Mestas-Nunez, and Will Drennan)