Review of the Observed Energy Flow in the Earth System

• Published in: Atmosphere
• Main Authors: Chunlei Liu, Ni Chen, Jingchao Long, Ning Cao, Xiaoqing Liao, Yazhu Yang, Niansen Ou, Liang Jin, Rong Zheng, Ke Yang, Qianye Su
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2022
• Subjects: TOA radiative flux; mass corrected atmospheric energy divergence; net surface energy flux; energy transport; Meteorology. Climatology; QC851-999; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13101738; https://doaj.org/article/fee74bc2ad3448f78e667ed64a9dfa92

The energy budget imbalance at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) and the energy flow in the Earth’s system plays an essential role in climate change over the global and regional scales. Under the constraint of observations, the radiative fluxes at TOA have been reconstructed prior to CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) between 1985 and 2000. The total atmospheric energy divergence has been mass corrected based on ERA5 (the fifth generation ECMWF ReAnalysis) atmospheric reanalysis by a newly developed method considering the enthalpy removing of the atmospheric water vapor, which avoids inconsistencies due to the residual lateral total mass flux divergence in the atmosphere, ensuring the balances of the freshwater fluxes at the surface. The net surface energy flux ( F s ) has been estimated using the residual method based on energy conservation, which is the difference between the net TOA radiative flux and the atmospheric energy tendency and divergence. The F s is then verified directly and indirectly with observations, and results show that the estimated F s in North Atlantic is superior to those from model simulations. This paper gives a brief review of the progress in the estimation of the observed energy flow in the Earth system, discusses some caveats of the existing method, and provides some suggestions for the improvements of the aforementioned data sets.