The Photon Current - 10

Fig. 1 Photon Stream

I. Photon Flow

Photons travel from stars, including our Sun, through space.

They do the same thing in seawater, that is, they travel through the space between atoms into the electrons of other atoms in that space.

Their arrival and departure 'direction' is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which is the direction from hot to cold (warm to cool).

In seawater the physics of photon heat flow is not under the ultimate control of water flowing in ocean currents (fluid dynamics), rather photon heat flow is under the control of the laws of quantum physics/thermodynamics. 

II. Appendices

Today's appendices contain graphic depictions of ocean heat, a.k.a. potential enthalpy (h^o), flow at thirty-three (33) WOD ocean depths over a 'recent' span of time (Appendix 1, Appendix 2, Appendix 3, Appendix 4, Appendix 5, Appendix 6).

Each appendix has a different depth context: Appendix 1 includes all 33 WOD depths (and all 5 pelagic depths),  Appendix 2 includes only epipelagic depths,  Appendix 3 includes only mesopelagic depths,  Appendix 4 includes only bathypelagic depths,  Appendix 5 includes only abyssopelagic depths,  and Appendix 6 includes only hadopelagic depths.

But, all of those 5 pelagic depth levels (appendices 2 - 6) are based on a portion of the the Appendix 1 33 WOD depths view (only Appendix 1 has all 33 WOD and all 5 pelagic depths shown at once).

The other appendices contain only portions of the 33 depths.

Each of those portions are within only one pelagic level (in other words, the Appendix 2 - Appendix 6 graph lines are extracted from the spaghetti looking Appendix 1 so that you can 'see' them better).

NOTE: The basic in situ data (sea water temperature, salinity, and depth) of all 33 depth levels comes from the World Ocean Database (WOD).

III. Ocean Details

The main ocean areas involved are the Arctic, Southern, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific.

In addition, three 'ocean groups' (smaller ocean areas combined together) are featured, which are composites as follows:

Group Misc_1 is composed of data from
Mediterranean, Black_Sea, Baltic_Sea,
Persian_Gulf, Red_Sea, Sulu_Sea and
Yellow_Sea sources.

Group Misc_2 is composed of data from
Sea_of_Japan, Seto_Inland_Sea, Hudson_Bay,
Andaman_Sea, Arabian_Sea, Bay_of_Bengal,
and Bering_Sea sources.

Group Misc_3 is composed of data from
Caribbean_Sea, Gulf_of_Mexico, North_Sea,
South_China_Sea, Sea_of_Okhotsk, and
Adriatic_Sea sources.

IV. Depth Details

All depths are in meters (m).

The following graph line colors indicate the WOD depths in all ocean areas on all of the graphs in all of the appendices:

Sea level to 200m (red)
201m to 1000m (green)
1001m to 4000m (brown)
4001m to 5500m (orchid)
5501 to bottom (blue)

The pelagic depths contain multiple WOD depth levels as follows:

WOD (L1 - L33) vs Pelagic (epi, meso, bathy, abysso, hado)

L1-L9 = epipelagic (0-200m)
L10-L18 = mesopelagic (201-1000m)
L19-L29 = bathypelagic (1001-4000m)
L30-L32 = abyssopelagic (4001-5500m)
L33 = hadopelagic (>5500m)

L1/10m, L2/20m, L3/30m, L4/50m, L5/75m, L6/100m,
L7/125m, L8/150m, L9/200m

L10/250m, L11/300m, L12/400m, L13/500m, L14/600m,
L15/700m, L16/800m, L17/900m, L18/1000m

L19/1100m, L20/1200m, L21/1300m, L22/1400m, L23/1500m,
L24/1750m, L25/2000m, L26/2500m, L27/3000m, L28/3500m,
L29/4000m

L30/4500m, L31/5000m, L32/5500m,

L33/>5500m

V. Closing Comments

Some of this information is not generally contained in high level physics textbooks because water currents are conflated with photon heat currents via the use of formulae for fluid dynamics:

"Hence it is clear that the restrictions associated with use of the FTR ['fundamental thermodynamic relationship'] are not fulfilled when we combine it with the First Law and write the result using fluid dynamic notation and interpretation as though it might apply to the real ocean. We conclude that there are small thermodynamic inconsistencies involved with combining the FTR and the First Law into the forms of Eqs. (3) and (4). This same inconsistency is common to all advanced thermodynamics textbooks and is rarely discussed; a rare mention of the issue appears on the last page of Sect. 49 of Landau and Lifshitz (1959). Importantly, we point out below (in the paragraph that contains our Eq. 6) that in physical oceanography we do not need to use the evolution of entropy as it appears in Eqs. (3) and (4), but rather we exploit the fact that entropy is a function only of state variables and so can be expressed in the functional form." 

(McDougall, T. J., Barker, P. M., Feistel, R., and Roquet, F.: A thermodynamic potential of seawater in terms of Absolute Salinity, Conservative Temperature, and in situ pressure, Ocean Sci., 19, 1719–1741, 2023; cf. Potential Enthalpy: A Conservative Oceanic Variable for Evaluating Heat Content and Heat Fluxes, 2003).

Clearly the patterns of Conservative Temperature (CT) and potential enthalpy (h^o) shown in today's appendices are not the patterns of water currents (fluid dynamics), they are patterns of heat content being transferred by infrared photons.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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