A Deep Look At Latitude Layers

Fig. 1 WOD Layers by latitude

I used to wonder about how warmer water found its way to the great current around Antarctica (see the ACC).

The laws of thermodynamics taught me that hot flows to cold, warm flows to cool. 

So, that would mean that the 93% of the increasing global warming from the Sun would spontaneously travel to cooler waters, thus, since the cooler waters, in most ocean locations, are at the deepest depths, I wondered if there are indications in the WOD database (Fig. 1) that would tend to verify that dynamic.

The menu below links to three sets of graphs which indicate the affirmative answer to that question.

Notice that the graph lines representing the deepest ocean depths (hadopelagic "hado") are represented by the mauve color (tannish), and the next deepest layer (abyssopelagic "abysso") is represented by the orcid (purplish) colored lines.

The "hado" in many if not most cases is warmer than the shallower "abysso" indicating that the solar radiation makes its way to the deepest parts of the oceans.

 

Appendices	Link
CT	Conservative Temperature
MOL Counts	Photon Counts
MOL+CT	MOL Counts + Conservative Temperature

The Meaning of "Conservative Temperature" is explained by (this or this).

A "MOL" (mole) is a specific number of photons (Einstein unit).

The "MOL Counts + Conservative Temperature" page has graphs of the proportion of photon quantity to temperature.

The "take-home" is that CT is a value that is preserved and consistent in all depths and turbulent areas in the currents of the ocean.

Additional information:  TEOS-10 Primer; Quantum Oceanography, 2, 3, 4

If you want to generate your own data & graphs you can download a TEOS-10 library at no cost here (That C++ library was  used to generate today's graph data, but not the graphs).