Can I use surface temperature (TS) to build an SST forcing file?

[whannah]

I've run 10 years of the fully coupled and super-parmaeterized CESM. I want to run another atmosphere-only experiment that uses climatological SSTs from the first. I intended to do what is described in this post:  http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/cesm1.1/cesm/doc/usersguide/x2410.htmlHowever, the POP monthly output does not include SST by default, and I forgot to add it. The run was very costly, so running it again is not an option. On the other hand, in the CAM monthly output I have surface temperature (TS) and surface sea-ice fraction (ICEFRAC). So, can I make the data ocean surface forcing file from TS and ICEFRAC in the CAM monthly output?Do I need to be concerned about the points that are partially covered by land?Will the "bcgen" utility take care of the time diddling?  Thanks,
Walter

 

[hannay]

You cannot use TS to construct the SST dataset. Over ocean only, it is ok (TS=SST for ocean only gridbox) but the problem is that over gridbox that contain land and ocean (or sea-ice and ocean) you cannot compute the SST from TS becasue TS is computed using not only the ocean SST, but also surface temperature over land, sea-ice, ..It would be surprising that the ocean temperature is not output (I think it is called temp). If you take the temperature on the upper level of the ocean, you can use this as SST.  

 

[whannah]

Thanks Cecile,The "TEMP" variable in the .h file is "potential temperature", so I initally thought it woudln't work, but I think just taking this at the 500cm level should work.I'll try this and report back if there are any problems.Thanks!