Understanding the Role of Oceanic Feedback in a Fully Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction

Isolating the role of ocean feedback in the climate change response to greenhouse gas induced warming in fully coupled system has been a challenge. To this end, we construct and conduct partially coupled experiments in which only the passive tracer component of the SST or salinity anomaly is allowed to feed back to the atmosphere. The passive tracer-like temperature/salinity anomalies by design, is forced by surface flux anomalies of atmospheric origin alone. In combination with the further constraints on wind stress we can isolate the effect on SST and ocean heat uptake due entirely to an oceanic origin. With a hierarchy of partially coupled climate sytem, explore the role of ocean feedback in climate sensitivity, ocean heat uptake efficacy, and time scale of the internal modes of climate variability