Heat and Fresh Water Fluxes

The ocean-atmosphere interchange heat, conditioning the circulation of both and hence the global climate. The large thermal inertia of water makes the ocean to ameliorate the meteorological cycle with maximum release of heat to the atmosphere in autumn and maximum capture of heat in spring. Due to this air-sea heat transfer surface waters lose buoyancy and sinks, feeding the ocean interior circulation. The estimates of heat transfer are critical for meteorological and climatic models and global maps of heat fluxes are constructed regularly. However, a local measure of air-seafluxes can only be achieved by oceano-meteorological buoys measuring several magnitudes in both atmosphere and ocean, being the most important temperatures at air and sea and wind speed but including also humidity, atmospheric pressure or salinity. See Somavilla et.al. 2009 and 2011 for analysis and use of air-sea heatfluxes based on the AGL buoy data.

The following figures provide realtime series of sensible and latent heatfluxes into de ocean based on the parameters measured by the AGL buoy.