Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC) Surface Flux Climatology (Version 1.1).

This directory contains climatological monthly mean files of air-sea fluxes on a global grid in netCDF format produced at the Southampton Oceanography Centre.

The fields have been derived from the COADS1a (1980-93) dataset enhanced with additional metadata from the WMO47 list of ships. A full description of the fields will be given in an atlas currently being prepared and a parallel journal paper will describe the results of various evaluation studies.

It is important to note that the quality of the fields has a strong spatial dependence which reflects the global distribution of ship observations. Quality is likely to be high in the well sampled North Atlantic & North Pacific but to decrease in the Southern Hemisphere. In particular, south of 40 S the errors in the fields are likely to be large and we recognize the existence of spurious features which have been generated during the objective analysis of the original raw fields. We stress that caution must be taken when interpreting the fields in this region.

In addition, note that the current version of the fields does not give closure of the global heat budget, the imbalance being a global mean net heat gain by the ocean of 29 W/m^2. Ongoing work is being carried out to identify regions in which we believe the net heat gain has been overestimated. Results from several regional comparisons against high quality meteorological buoy data indicate that in those regions for which comparisons have been possible the SOC net heat flux estimates agree well with independent buoy measurements. Hence, we have not applied global adjustments to the heat flux components in order to balance the heat budget at this stage of our analysis.

The fields are freely available by ftp to interested users for non-commercial scientific research; use of the fields should be acknowledged in publications arising from the research. We encourage users to inform us by email if they transfer the files giving a contact address and a short summary of research interest. By doing this we will be able to inform you of future modifications/updates to the fields. For this purpose and for general queries contact: Simon.A.Josey@soc.soton.ac.uk

For further information on the climatology see: http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/JRD/MET/fluxclimatology.html

References:
Josey,S.A., E.C.Kent, D.Oakley and P.K.Taylor, 1996:
A new global air - sea heat and momentum flux climatology. International WOCE
Newsletter, 24, 3 - 5.

Josey, S. A., E. C. Kent and P. K. Taylor, 1999 : New insights into the ocean he
at budget closure problem from analysis of the SOC air-sea flux climatology.
Journal of Climate, accepted.

Funding has been received from the Hadley Centre, UK Meteorological Office for the production and analysis of this dataset.

Thanks to Peter Gleckler, LLNI for preparation of this netCDF version.

From this interface, you can download the individual files:

hfls.nc	Latent Heat Flux
hfns.nc	Net Heat Flux
hfss.nc	Sensible Heat Flux
pr.nc	Precipitation
rls.nc	Net Longwave Flux
rss.nc	Net Shortwave Flux
tauu.nc	Wind Stress (eastward)
tauv.nc	Wind Stress (northward)

Each file contains 12 climatological monthly means on a global 1 x 1 grid for a particular flux field.

E-Mail Peter Taylor with your questions or comments.

Webmaster: Mark Bennett
Contacts: Jennifer Lovell and Shawn Smith
Email: wocemet@coaps.fsu.edu
Copyright (c) 2001 COAPS