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| Fig. 1 Atlantic Ocean (World Ocean Database) |
I. Introduction
This series concerns the flow of photons from the Sun through what was once simply called 'space' (but is now considered to be 'Spacetime') until they flow into the land masses and the oceans of the Earth (The Photon Current, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14).
When the ocean's seawater molecules absorb those photons it increases the 'heat content' of the ocean.
That 'heat content' is technically called 'potential enthalpy'; scientific symbol 'h0'):
"it is perfectly valid to talk of potential enthalpy, h0, as the 'heat content' and to regard the flux of h0 as the 'heat flux.' " (Potential Enthalpy: A Conservative Oceanic Variable for Evaluating Heat Content and Heat Fluxes).
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"Potential temperature is used in oceanography as though it is a conservative variable like salinity; however, turbulent mixing processes conserve enthalpy and usually destroy potential temperature. This negative production of potential temperature is similar in magnitude to the well-known production of entropy that always occurs during mixing processes. Here it is shown that potential enthalpy—the enthalpy that a water parcel would have if raised adiabatically and without exchange of salt to the sea surface—is more conservative than potential temperature by two orders of magnitude. Furthermore, it is shown that a flux of potential enthalpy can be called “the heat flux” even though potential enthalpy is undefined up to a linear function of salinity. The exchange of heat across the sea surface is identically the flux of potential enthalpy. This same flux is not proportional to the flux of potential temperature because of variations in heat capacity of up to 5%. The geothermal heat flux across the ocean floor is also approximately the flux of potential enthalpy with an error of no more that 0.15%. These results prove that potential enthalpy is the quantity whose advection and diffusion is equivalent to advection and diffusion of “heat” in the ocean." (A thermodynamic potential of seawater in terms of Absolute Salinity, Conservative Temperature, and in situ pressure).
Those two papers quoted above indicate that the energy of the Sun, in the form of visible photons ('light') and invisible photons ('infrared'), make up the 'heat content' in the oceans.
Those photons, whether they are visible to us or not, are absorbed by molecules of seawater:
"Visible sunlight makes up about 40 percent of the total energy Earth receives from the sun. The rest of the energy Earth receives from the sun is not visible. About 50 percent is infrared energy, nine percent is ultraviolet (UV) energy, and one percent is X-rays or microwaves. Electromagnetic radiation is made up of electromagnetic waves that are defined by their wavelength and frequency. Of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the human eye can view only a small portion of electromagnetic waves in the form of light."
(Light Energy and the Electromagnetic Spectrum). Therefore photons can be considered as the quanta which 'potential enthalpy' a.k.a 'ocean heat' is made of.
I use the GISS surface temperature data as an indicator of the pattern of that heat energy at the surface and below the surface.
Those GISS values are taken from the 'ocean surface anomaly' values stored in a GISTEMP 4 data CSV file.
II. Surface Heat and Deep Heat
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| Fig. 2 GISStemp Projection (estimate) |
The graphs shown in today's post (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2) indicate that as the photons are absorbed by seawater and become a part of the potential enthalpy heat content they then are subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
They will then only flow from hot to cold, i.e. from warmer water into cooler water (or air, etc.).
Over timescales subject to the hot/cold or warm/cool thermodynamic environment, the photons will be emitted from their current molecule and will flow into other seawater molecules.
The direction of their flow is determined by the seawater temperatures around (above, below, beside) them.
That flow does take place because otherwise the actual (WOD data) pattern shown in Fig. 1 would have become the pattern shown in Fig. 2.
The Conservative Temperature of the TEOS-10 stricture pattern (Fig. 1) is reformed by the grafting software using the GISS surface temperature ocean surface values to modify them into the Fig. 2 pattern .
That Fig. 2 pattern is what the Fig. 1 pattern would become if no Second Law of Thermodynamics existed.
III. Closer Analysis
That is because among other things those photons are consistently on the move as the Second Law of Thermodynamics kicks in after the photon's journey from the Sun ends.
Thus, what the two graphs show is that if the photons did not move to cooler seawater near them the graph at Fig. 2 would be the resulting pattern.
The Fig. 2 graph shows what the original Conservative Temperature pattern would become.
That is because the heat then at the surface in seawater molecules would continually increase as more and more photons entered surface seawater molecules and remained there.
The Fig 2 graph shows that the actual temperature pattern shown in Fig. 1 is prevented from becoming the Fig. 2 pattern.
In other words the heat flux is composed of infrared photon flow from hot/warm at the surface to colder/cooler water.
This repeats over and over at each ocean depth at different rates depending on day and night temperature changes and summer and winter temperature changes.
This is fundamental science (warm/hot flows spontaneously to cool/cold) which is still known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
IV. Closing Comments
Today's WOD ocean temperature values are from the Atlantic Ocean measurements stored in the World Ocean Database.
In future posts of this series I will focus on additional ocean areas.
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
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