Today we take another look at World Ocean Database 'layers' 0-17.
As the graphic to the left shows, these layers are based on latitudes and proceed from the North Pole layer (0) down to the South Pole layer (17).
In the previous posts of this series other aspects of these layers were discussed (New Slang, 2, 3, 4).
In today's post we are taking a look at Conservative Temperature (Appendix One), Photon Count at those CT values in those layers (Appendix Two), and simply Photon Counts at those layers (Appendix Three).
The depths involved are expressed in the 'new slang' for three 'Pelagic Depths (Epipelagic, Mesopelagic, and Bathypelagic).
I have not been shy about how important the work of Gibbs was and is:
"Listening to Gibbs, who is perhaps the most influential historical voice
in ocean thermodynamics (encapsulated in TEOS-10) would also help:
"Albert Einstein called him 'the greatest mind in American history.'
Gibbs’s studies of thermodynamics and discoveries in statistical
mechanics paved the way for many of Einstein’s later discoveries."
"TEOS-10 is based on a Gibbs function formulation from which all thermodynamic properties of seawater (density, enthalpy, entropy sound speed, etc.) can be derived in a thermodynamically consistent manner."
(Thermodynamic Equation Of Seawater - 2010,
emphasis added). Or they can continue to flop around like the
scientists who forgot about gravity in the ocean realm, as pointed out
by Woodward 1888; scientists who therefore could not figure out some
major variations in sea level change (NASA Busts The Ghost)."
The modern TEOS-10 software toolbox, however, is the result of the work of live scientists, and if you use it please follow their request: "If you use the GSW Oceanographic Toolbox we ask that you include a
reference to ...
'McDougall and Barker (2011), whose full citation is: McDougall, T.J. and P.M. Barker, 2011: Getting started with TEOS-10
and the Gibbs Seawater (GSW) Oceanographic Toolbox, 28pp., SCOR/IAPSO
WG127, ISBN 978-0-646-55621-5'"
The main gist of the requirement to use high-energy, high-speed computer software libraries is the quantity of data.
III. Get Up To Speed
I have pointed out that Dredd Blog uses ~5.5 billion in situ measurements to generate graphs and other data for users to peruse (WOD Update).
Processing one measurement per second would take 91,666,666.67 minutes, which is 1,527,777.78 hours, which is 63,657.41 days, which is ~174.3 years.
Take the Dredd Blog advice and use a computer (mine processes this data in a few seconds).
IV. Use It Already
Use TEOS-10 and a worthy computer or lose touch with the world according to measurements.
Don't be like 'laid back Francois' in the video below, or the seaports will already be under meters of water before you complete your white-board calculations (Seaports With Sea Level Change, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12).
As I mentioned in yesterday's post (Quantum Oceanography - 5), the WOD updated its vast database, so I am updating some additional graphs today as I did yesterday.
The graphs being updated today concern the temperature at which glacial ice melts at the depths along the grounding lines of tidewater glaciers all along the coastlines of Antarctica.
The bottom line is that the ambient water temperature suffices to cause glacial ice it is close to, or in contact with, to melt (Quantum Oceanography - 5).
Since the ice we are talking about is grounding line ice, this contributes to sea level rise.
The way the graphs are set up is that the temperatures of the ambient seawater are represented by the top three graph lines.
Each color represents a different Pelagic depth.
The three lines at the bottom of the graphs represent the temperature at which the glacial ice melts at that depth.
Again, each color represents a different depth, as detailed on each graph.
Each graph represents a different sector of Antarctica (except the one that is a mean average combination of all sectors).
How the melting Antarctic glacial ice fits into that scenario is that the equivalent of a couple hundred feet of sea level rise is contained in the ice sheet of Antarctica (USGS).
In this series, in the first post, I stepped into the fresh concept 'Quantum Oceanography' (Quantum Oceanography, 2, 3, 4).
The concept may or may not have been nicknamed that prior to this series; I just could not find it with a Google Search then; but now it shows up as a Dredd Blog link.
Go figure.
Anyway, in today's fifth element (😎) of this series there are plenty of graphs to update the concept, because the World Ocean Database folks updated their data sets, which allowed me to extend the span of coverage in the graphs from 1970-2019 to 1970-2020.
I updated simply because they recently updated their data set in January of 2021, which included a lot of new 2020 measurements (WOD updates).
A recent Dredd Blog post (which was in response to Dr. Eric Rignot's encouragement that researchers should keep a focus on the 'Grounding Lines' of Antarctica's tidewater glaciers) pointed out how the phenomenon of warming deep water there was a central factor impacting grounding line ice melt (Antarctica 2.0 - 11).
So, I prepared some updated graphs that are relevant:
The subjects of the graphs (Photons, Potential Enthalpy, Conservative Temperature, and Quantum Proportion) were explained in previous posts.
These graphs, in keeping with that heads up from Dr. Rignot, show that The Southern Ocean waters (surrounding and touching Antarctica) are indeed different from the other oceans at those depths (the Southern Ocean graphs are the final graph on each appendix).
That is, its two deepest water depths on the Pelagic scale are closer in temperature than any of the other oceans (the deepest in some cases is warmer than the shallower depth).
