The Photon Current - 16

The 'mystery' of ocean heat

In the previous post of this series I indicated that additional oceans would be discussed in coming posts of this series.

The appendices to today's post (APNDX TPC-16 and APNDX TPC-16 GISStemp) do that to some extent by adding the Pacific Ocean to the list.

But more than that, within those appendices I have added graphs that deal with the essential characteristics of ocean heat as described in the TEOS-10 C++ library I use to calculate these values.

Those characteristics were discussed by scientists in "Potential Enthalpy: A Conservative Oceanic Variable for Evaluating Heat Content and Heat Fluxes" and "A thermodynamic potential of seawater in terms of Absolute Salinity, Conservative Temperature, and in situ pressure" and "Quantifying the nonconservative production of conservative temperature, potential temperature, and entropy".

Those specific characteristics I am focusing on are Conservative Temperature,  Enthalpy, Entropy, and Potential Enthalpy.

I also throw in 'mol' a.k.a 'mole' quantities which I calculated on my own for good measure.

The photon current in the ocean is the heat current, which would make things more simple if it was used accordingly:

"The problem of how best to model advection and diffusion of “heat” in the ocean is not an easy one to solve. First, it is difficult to define what “heat” actually is in the ocean."

(ibid, "Quantifying the nonconservative production of conservative temperature ..."). The graphs in today's appendices show that the patterns of heat flux are the footprints/fingerprints of photons being emitted from 'warmer' molecules into 'colder' molecules pursuant to The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The graphs in the APNDX TPC-16 GISStemp appendix show what would happen if there was no Second Law of Thermodynamics (cf. The Photon Current - 15).

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

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