Compute heat transport as cp*VT + L*VQ + VZ?

[tom_kilpatrick@gmail_com]

This is a related question to Jing's from a few months ago; I am trying to compute atmospheric heat transport and am wondering whether this is the correct equation:AHT = cp*VT + L*VQ + VZ.When I compute the heat transport this way, the results look different from the inferred transport that I obtain from the radiative and surface heat fluxes (see plot). It looks like using the above equation misses the eddy contribution or something.

 

[tom_kilpatrick@gmail_com]

Here is the figure.

 

[tom_kilpatrick@gmail_com]

Nevermind, this is explained in Yang et al. (2015). VT, VQ, and VZ include the eddy contributions; the issue is the influence of a "spurious" v on the transport. Apparently this is related to the interpolation from model sigma-coordiantes to p-coordinates (see Eq. 29 in the reference). Big shout to the authors for their responses to my email queries.Yang, H., Q. Li, K. Wang, Y. Sun and D. Sun (2015): Decomposing the meridional heat transport in the climate system. Climate Dynamics 44, 2751–2768, doi:10.1007/s00382-014-2380-5.

 

[bowen_zhao@yale_edu]

Do you think you missed g0 in VZ? I'm calculating the same problem but got even worse results...

 

[tom_kilpatrick@gmail_com]

I'm not sure. My notes say that "VZ" includes the factor of g0, but the netcdf file metadata implies VZ does not include the g0 factor: float VZ(time, lev, lat, lon) ;VZ:mdims = 1 ;VZ:units = "m2/s" ;VZ:long_name = "Meridional transport of geopotential energy" ;VZ:cell_methods = "time: mean" ;