Eddies pull carbon emissions into deep ocean, new model simulates complex process
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 24, 2015–Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a computer model that clarifies the complex processes driving ocean mixing in the vast eddies that swirl across hundreds of miles of open ocean.
“The model enables us to study the important processes of ocean storms, which move heat and carbon from the atmosphere into the deep ocean,” said Todd Ringler, who leads the Accelerated Climate Model for Energy (ACME) ocean science team at Los Alamos. “This happens very slowly, but over the next 1,000 years, much of the fossil fuel carbon emissions will end up in the deep ocean; ocean eddies make that happen.”
The Lagrangian In-situ, Global, High-performance particle Tracking (LIGHT) model is a first-of-its-kind tool because of its ability to exploit the power available from today’s supercomputers.
Global climate simulations are beginning to be able to resolve the largest ocean eddies, called mesoscale eddies, which are considered the “weather” of the ocean. The model that the Laboratory researchers developed for ocean mixing leads to an improved understanding of these mesoscale eddies and how they mix the ocean waters. This information increases global climate simulation accuracy through a better representation of heat fluxes and carbon into the deep ocean.
Eddies move heat, carbon, and other biogeochemical tracers from the ocean surface into the deep ocean and, as a result, store the carbon and heat away from the atmosphere. Transport and mixing regulates the global climate and the distribution of natural marine resources.
The team’s paper “Diagnosing isopycnal diffusivity in an eddying, idealized mid-latitude ocean basin via Lagrangian In-situ, Global, High-performance particle Tracking (LIGHT),” was recently published in the Journal of Physical Oceanography. The work will be released as part of the Model for Prediction Across Scales Ocean (MPAS-O), a core component of ACME.
The MPAS-O is a global, multiscale, ocean code that simulates spatial and temporal scales ranging from coastal dynamics to basin-wide circulations. The primary application of MPAS-O is for the global ocean and its role in the evolution of global climate change. In their research, the team conducted ocean simulations with a massive number of particles spread evenly throughout the ocean; each particle is carried along with the ocean currents.
“Not only does each particle tell us about the ocean currents, but groups of particles tell us how turbulence in the ocean mixes temperature and carbon dioxide throughout the ocean” said Phillip Wolfram, a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory and a member of the ACME science team.
The results highlight the capability of LIGHT to compute the horizontal and vertical structure of diffusivity within the high-performance computing of MPAS-O, Wolfram said.
“This project quantifies the key fundamental processes of the ocean and points the way to improved techniques to better simulate climate change over a range of spatial and temporal scales,” Wolfram said.
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I notice that the paper mentions CO2 only near the end, the rest of the time it talks of carbon and particles.
Do they mean soot and coal dust?
Sloppy writing.
Where are phytoplankton and photosynthesis? Also, zooplankton makes diurnal vertical migration in both directions. It used to be called deep scattering layer. Therefore, carbon can move in both directions contrary to physical theory. Some carbon drops out of the system by fecal pellets. Is the “fecal express” included in this model?
Vast Eddy is a great name for a band.
I have nothing of substance to contribute here, sorry.
They were my favorite band in high school.
This appeared to be based on a idealized ocean basin and so has very little to do with the real world.
Ok: you start with an idealizedk ocean basin and see how it behaves. Then you apply it to a real world ocean basin and see how well the idealized model compares to the real thing. If it doesn’t correlate well you tweak the model and compare again. Repeat as many times as needed. If you cannot get model results that accurately reflect the real world. Go back to the drawing board.
ok, we start by assuming a spherical, homogeneous ocean …
I always love the heat dissipation in a race horse problem – start with a spherical horse radiating as a perfect black body…
I find it hard to believe that heat descends to the abyssal deep.
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coldocean.html ,
Unless they are talking about carbon storage. CO2 and carbon get stored there in different forms http://www.ghgonline.org/co2sinkocean.htm and http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/environment-book/carboncycleE.html
But heat sinking to the bottom? That stretches credulity.
Right on Pamela. WUWT discussed the thermohaline circulation at length several weeks ago, and it seemed very clear that the principle driver of vertical movement is salinity, and the only place on Earth with sufficiently cold and salty conditions to allow water to descend from near the surface to the abyss occurs in the Arctic.
And the return flow is not so much of a flow as a oceanwide displacement upwards as new cold water forces it’s way down.
The deep ocean circulation and mixing is one of the favorite areas of research carried on by BIOS. And at least in this instance, their focus is on natural processes. No mention of global anthropogenic deep sea warming that I can detect.
http://www.bios.edu/research/projects/dynamite/
The only place where I would say this might not apply is the Red Sea. If there were not a shelf at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, that very warm, salty water would sink to the bottom because of its salt density. Because of the shelf, that warm salt-dense water is held inside the basin and doesn’t sink to the abyss.
Yes. This seems to be – my eagerly expected – serious blow to the Bern model (which assumes CO2 sink saturation)
This seems like basically one of the FIRST steps that should be taken if you want to understand the earths climate systems.
Once again a model that assumes what it is trying to prove. Why don’t they start off by trying to understand how CO2 emissions contribute to the total CO2 in the atmosphere.
From ACME?
“Analyzing ocean mixing reveals insight on climate”
Ok, so the text of the article seems to make it clear that this was not an analysis of the ocean, it was a computer simulation.
No actual ocean or actual mixing was studied.
Title/headline is misleading.
Hmmm. This link describes how ocean storms RELEASE heat to the upper atmosphere. If the above article describes how storms result in heat being added to the oceans, I don’t see how that can happen. We are talking about longwave infrared heat
http://oceanmotion.org/html/background/climate.htm
This link describes the wicked problem of determine net balance between LW radiation up out of the oceans versus LW radiation down from the atmosphere. Clouds get in the way of any kind of precision, meaning that the average measure is quite low but the variance is way wide.
http://www.opl.ucsb.edu/tommy/pubs/15_siegel.pdf
So they’ve won the millennium prize for solving fluid dynamics have they? No? Oh. So just another worthless model then.
Not to mention thermodynamic theory as it relates to circulation.
http://www.intechopen.com/books/thermodynamics-interaction-studies-solids-liquids-and-gases/thermodynamics-of-the-oceanic-general-circulation-is-the-abyssal-circulation-a-heat-engine-or-a-mech
My god they are carbon obsessed!!!
What that model is showing, that even if it does not actually happen, which would violating all of the strick density statification that has alread been measured, shown and written about, it really should be happpening… according to the new super computer model ver 1.0
This program was clearly written for Trenberth to give him a peer-reviewed method to hide his heat away. I still say density always trumps.
This diagram was created by Wally Broeker and has no basis in reality, it is an urban legend.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090513130942.htm
There is no thermal thermohaline conveyer that tightly connects the Southern hemisphere with the Northern hemisphere. Wally stated later that there is no data to support the thermal conveyer diagram he drew and stated later that drawing was only to illustrate a concept, the concept being it is possible to make up stuff and if the stuff is repeated a sufficient number of time it becomes a sort of belief, a urban legend.
Wally is also responsible for the urban legend that a complete shutdown of the North Atlantic drift current is somehow responsible for cyclic abrupt climate change. Basic modeling runs confirms a complete shutdown of the North Atlantic drift current would only result in winter cooling in Europe of a few degrees. The majority of the warming of Europe is due to the Westerly winds and the heat retained in the North Atlantic from summer heating. Europe is warm for the same reason that West coast of the US is roughly 10 C warmer in the winter than the east coast of the US.
This is Wally’s Conveyor Urban legend paper, complete with the famous saying Climate is an angry beast, showing someone pocking the climate.
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/FACULTY/POPP/Broecker%201999%20GSA%20Today.pdf
The following are two papers that show Wally’s Gulf stream/North Atlantic drift current changes/shutdown is an urban legend, that is repeated ad infinitum by the media and the cult of CAGW.
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-source-of-europes-mild-climate
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~david/Gulf.pdf
Are you saying the entire concept of a thermohaline circulation is a myth?
Is Wally the author of the article in the first link above?
I seemed to get the impression the diagram he said he made up is the one showing the Gulf Stream descending and returning along the East coast.
Wiiliam Astley:
Broeker is a geologist. I know of no physical oceanographer specializing in ocean circulation who takes his “conveyor belt” depiction seriously. In fact, Wunsch calls it “a fairy tale for adults.”
“The model enables us to study the important processes of ocean storms, which move heat and carbon from the atmosphere into the deep ocean,” said Todd Ringler.
If that is so, it seems to me that the ocean storms would also move heat and carbon from the ocean into the atmosphere.
Storms cause massive, complex, deep waves in the ocean and hence cause complex deep mixing of the surface ocean with the deep ocean. Storms explain partially explain why there is no discrete ocean conveyor. (See my above comment.)
Mixing of the surface ocean with the deep ocean also explains why the lifetime for a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere is 5 to 7 years where the IPCC Bern ‘model’ assumes it is 200 years and a portion forever. I repeat the Bern model assumes a portion of the anthropogenic CO2 remains in the atmosphere forever.
Detailed scientific analysis as opposed to the IPCC’s sciency analysis that is done to push an agenda confirms, the majority of the CO2 increase in the last 30 years (not less than 66%) are due to natural causes, not due to anthropogenic emissions.
The Bern model assumes almost no mixing of the surface ocean (top 100 meters) with the deep ocean. As we all know now due to the heat hiding in the deep ocean hypothesis there is significant mixing of the deep ocean water with the surface ocean. If there is significant mixing of deep ocean water with surface water (this what the heat hiding in the deep ocean hypothesis requires) then the majority of the anthropogenic CO2 will be transferred into the deep ocean carbon reservoir which is more than 50 times greater than the atmospheric CO2 rise. The key logical point is that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very, very, small compared to the super enormous, deep ocean carbon reservoir.
http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/oco2/pia18934
A quick visual scan of the above satellite image of the changes in planetary CO2 October to November, 2014 indicates there is a problem with the standard theory (Bern model CO2 source/sink model) which is the number one basis for the IPCC report and the silly NASA dynamic model carbon source/sink that is displayed on the Web Vs observations.
The Bern model and the silly NASA dynamic models are urban legends that are repeated ad infinitum by the cult of CAGW.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.pdf
To determine what is the cause and what is the effect the standard analysis technique is lead/lag analysis. Lead/lag analysis is not controversial or particularly complicated or difficult to do in this case. It is interesting that we have spent two trillion dollars on green scams to reduce the rise in atmospheric (the green scams do not work) CO2 prior to doing lead/lag analysis to determine what the primary cause of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere was.
http://scholar.google.ca/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/18208928/233408642/name/phase%2Brelation%2Bbetween%2Batmospheric%2Bcarbon%2Band%2Bglobal%2Btemperature.pdf&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm2_FClsSVBbTLdzlwJJytToRLHpNw&oi=scholarr&ei=N-SVUvKOD9PtoATG6IHgCQ&sqi=2&ved=0CCsQgAMoADAA
The following is a good review paper of the history of CO2 atmospheric research and the history of the IPCC shenanigans. It is interesting that peer reviewed papers all contradict the IPCC’s Bern model assumptions.
The physical implication of the C14 bomb test analysis is the majority of the CO2 increase in the last 70 years was caused by the warming of the oceans rather than the anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Truly fascinating!
http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/ESEF3VO2.pdf
Another summary that explains IPCC shenanigans sources and sinks of atmospheric CO2.
Sources and sinks of CO2 Tom Quirk
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EE20-1_Quirk_SS.pdf
It is interesting to note that CO2 emissions are increasing sharply, but atmospheric CO2 seems to be on a flatish trajectory.
Actually, it is more than interesting. it is another of those “scraps” of information that all by itself should change some minds…but that is largely ignored after being noted.
If you look at the amount of co2 molecules that are reported each year, the increase closely follows solar cycles and cosmic ray flux. The highest amount of co2 increase still is in the year 1998. Although since I’ve been saying something about it, (Murphy’s Law) , this year will probably be the higher. What is interesting and somewhat confusing is how we are producing so much more co2 now, which half (per NOAA) is disappearing somewhere, ( we can verify this because of the volume of gas on earth and the reported amount of increase of co2 molecules and the amount of co2 produced. Actually my numbers are higher than 50% and that is on the low side) which that half overwhelms the amount produced in 1960, yet there was an increase in co2. So how is that possible when the oceans were cooler, less acidic and a lot more tropical rainforests being able to absorb much more co2 than present? Further, CAGW has stated on more than one occasion that co2 stays around in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. If under current modeling assumptions (linking the rate at which co2 is disappearing), if we stopped producing co2 as of right now, how long would it take for all co2 to be completely depleted from the atmosphere? Less than 100 years or as few as 20?
There is something seriously wrong with the numbers.
rishrac: “If under current modeling assumptions (linking the rate at which co2 is disappearing), if we stopped producing co2 as of right now, how long would it take for all co2 to be completely depleted from the atmosphere?”
Let’s take a look at a known depletion rate of atmospheric CO2.
Here is a plot of a single year of the Mauna Loa CO2 trace.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:2001.1/to:2002.1
From the drop in CO2 over the period 2001.3 to 2001.7, from ~373.8 to ~368.2 = 5.6ppm over a four month period, ie 16.8ppm per annum or ~6 years per 100ppm as a result of the growing season in the Northern hemisphere, it should be possible to get a good idea of the natural depletion rate of CO2.
So certainly less than 100 years, probably less than 20 to reduce the current level of CO2 from ~400ppm to ~300ppm.
That’s my point. CAGW stated that is takes hundreds of years to reduce co2 in the atmosphere. Evidently, that’s not true. Also, if the depletion is occurring now, what was happening before the Industrial revolution? There is something majorly wrong. If we weren’t adding co2, the numbers suggest that plant life for the planet would have died. ( 270ppm down to 170ppm in 20 years) That means that the carbon cycle is negative, and recently big time negative. The fact that there was any increase is a mystery. …. Thanks for the additional info … either the numbers they are putting out are wrong or we should be alarmed about something else.
ACME? Hummmm reminds me of a cartoon of desperate rodent trying to catch dinner…
Oh look, another new computer game!
Is it available on Xbox yet?
It’s the weather of the ocean, they say.
So, can the new supercomputer model predict at least 5 days into the future with any accuracy? Do they even have a metric which would allow them to make a prediction which could be measured?
When I saw this post title I hoped this would be some much needed common sense on how ocean circulation processes, oscillations and chaotic nonlinearity, drive climate change, glacial cycles etc.
But on reading it I was disappointed to find that all it is is a commercial brochure/flyer for a bit of fluid simulation computer code.
It points, as does most of what is written in climate journals currently, to the fundamental malaise of the field. Climate science is not driven by curiosity as to what actually lies behind climate processes. Instead the aim is simply to generate sciency sounding text about climate that will achieve a political goal.