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| Mesopelagic |
I. A Short History of Instruments
Analysis results in oceanography research vary depending on the instruments used to measure temperature, salinity, and depth.
The World Ocean Database (WOD) contains records collected using several types of research instruments (Access to World Ocean Database Time Sorted Data).
Today's graphs calculate saturation data taken from gld, osd, apb, uor, pfl, drb, and ctd instrument types (xbt, mrb, and mbt were not used).
Note that there are variations in accuracy among the different instrument types:
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| Epipelagic |
"Nansen bottle casts served as the main oceanographic instrumentation type for more than a century since the establishing of the technique in
the late 1890s. Between the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1990s Nansen cast technique has been gradually replaced by electronic sensor profilers (CTD). Both instrumentation types are considered as the most accurate among other oceanographic instruments and are often used as the unbiased reference."
(On the Consistency of the Bottle and CTD Profile Data). The authors cite to Improved estimates of ocean heat content from 1960 to 2015 as an attempt to improve upon in situ measurements they estimate could be made slightly more accurate.
II. A short History of Miscalculations Of Instrument Data
But their paper and the ones cited in it do not even mention the official oceanographic standard method of calculating ocean heat content (OHC).
From the data produced and placed into the WOD, we should calculate OHC using the TEOS-10 official methods:
"This site is the official source of information about the Thermodynamic Equation Of Seawater - 2010 (TEOS-10), and the way in which it should be used.
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. TEOS-10 was adopted by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at its 25th Assembly in June 2009 to replace EOS-80 as the official description of seawater and ice properties in marine science.
A significant change compared with past practice is that TEOS-10 uses Absolute Salinity SA (mass fraction of salt in seawater) as opposed to Practical Salinity SP (which is essentially a measure of the conductivity of seawater) to describe the salt content of seawater. Ocean salinities now have units of g/kg."
(TEOS-10, emphasis added). Or as Wikipedia puts it:
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| Bathypelagic |
"TEOS-10 (Thermodynamic Equation of Seawater - 2010) is the international standard for the use and calculation of the thermodynamic properties of seawater, humid air and ice. It supersedes the former standard EOS-80 (Equation of State of Seawater 1980). TEOS-10 is used by oceanographers and climate scientists to calculate and model properties of the oceans such as heat content in an internationally comparable way. "
(Wikipedia, emphasis added). The reason for the new TEOS-10 standard is and was the inaccuracies that were prevalent in calculations using the antiquated EOS-80 standard.
III. If We Don't Know What OHC Is We Are Not Likely To Find It
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| Multiple Depth Layers |
The old EOS-80 was two orders of magnitude off concerning OHC, which is now, in the modern TEOS-10 nomenclature, called "potential enthalpy":
It is usually the case that when you don't know what you are looking for you are not likely to find it.
So, here is a link and a quote from it that has been posted here previously:
"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. That is, it is proven that to very high accuracy, the first law of thermodynamics in the ocean is the conservation equation of potential enthalpy. It is shown that potential enthalpy is to be preferred over the Bernoulli function. A new temperature variable called “conservative temperature” is advanced that is simply proportional to potential enthalpy. It is shown that present ocean models contain typical errors of 0.1°C and maximum errors of 1.4°C in their temperature because of the neglect of the nonconservative production of potential temperature ... and potential temperature, rests on an incorrect theoretical foundation ... it is perfectly valid to talk of potential enthalpy, h0,as the 'heat content' ..."
(Potential Enthalpy: Trevor J. McDougall, 2003, emphasis added). Two decades later the science is still there:
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| Abyssopelagic |
"While in situ temperature is an observed variable, its dependence on pressure (even for adiabatic variations of pressure at constant salinity) and its non-conservative nature under turbulent mixing processes have led to the adoption of Conservative Temperature in order to approximate the 'heat content' per unit mass of seawater."
(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).
(In Search Of Ocean Heat - 15). Using EOS-80 concepts to improve upon instrument measurements is a faulty endeavor.
IV. Saturation Hypothesis Estimates
This Dredd Blog series has focused on degree of "saturation" based on the WOD maximum and minimum temperature and salinity tables detailing maximum and minimum values at various depths (The Saturation Chronicles).
Previous saturation analysis was also based upon 19 ocean areas without regard to the in situ measurement collection instruments.
I noticed that the graphs from these instruments show that the Abyssopelagic depth level is becoming more saturated than the Bathypelagic level above it.
This is to be expected when using modern concepts of quantum oceanography that includes photon science and TEOS-10.
Camera instruments can take snapshots of limited events in a movie, but since the movie is more complex than that, analysis using snap-shot photographs is immature.
Analyzing the "photos" of oceanographic instruments that only take snapshots of the ocean "movie" is haphazard too because OHC is constantly on the move from warmer seawater to colder seawater (second law of thermodynamics ... "warm flows spontaneously to cold").
The trend line of graphs tells the more accurate plot of the movement of OHC, so, "get the picture" is less accurate than "get the plot" in constant movement and change environments (The Photon Current, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 , 17, 18, 19, 20, 21).
We can't find the photons using science of the days when photons hadn't been discovered yet.
But, worst of all the authors write:
"The first efforts to construct global ocean heat content (OHC) time series from ocean profile data revealed the impact of the systematic errors in the data from expendable bathythermographs (XBT) (Gouretski and Koltermann 2007)"
(On the Consistency of the Bottle and CTD Profile Data, link above, p 1869). This is patently false for OHC purposes because the XBT does not measure salinity, which is required for OHC calculations.
The paper cites papers authored by Viktor Gouretski who points out that XBT cannot be used because it does not measure or record salinity:
"... data types normally report both temperature and salinity ... As both of these parameters are required for the spatial interpolation on isopycnal surfaces, the expendable (XBT) and mechanical (MBT) bathythermograph data were not used."
(Gouretski, V.: World Ocean Circulation Experiment, Ocean Sci., 14, 1127–1146, 2018). And note "An XBT probe is a less sophisticated instrument ... only measuring temperature as it descends through the water column" (Comparison of XBT vs CTD Data, PDF).
V. Closing Comments
The graphs today do not contain updates of recent years or of 19 ocean areas like these do, so I am adding three additional graphs (see Appendix below).
These show that saturation has increased in the Epipelagic and Mesopelagic depth levels in recent years.
Nevertheless the authors of the paper I am criticizing have shown that using EOS-80 ideology is backwards thinking of the useless kind.
The previous post in this series is here.
APPENDIX
(new files are data added since the release of WOD18)
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| Updated (using 2018-2023) |
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| Updated (using 2018-2023) |
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| Updated (using 2018-2023) |
