Forget, G., Winkelbauer, S., Mayer, M., Song, Y., Bourdalle-Badie, R., and Yang, C. (2026)
Presented at:
Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026Global ocean reanalyses provide the most comprehensive observational record of ocean transports, serving as a critical benchmark for evaluating coupled climate model projections over the historical record. Ocean heat transport (OHT) is a key component of Earth's climate system, yet uncertainties in its estimation remain a significant challenge. This study addresses this issue by first evaluating mutual agreement within an ensemble of global ocean reanalyses for plain OHT and effective OHT as a function of time scale and latitude. Leveraging the closed heat budgets provided by the ECCO reanalysis, we assess the relationship between OHT convergence and regional ocean heat content variations, as well as the uncertainties introduced by simplified transport estimation methods often used in observational OHT estimates. We further quantify uncertainties derived from data assimilation increments across reanalyses that do not enforce heat budget closure. Our findings underscore the importance of accounting for methodological and model-based uncertainties in OHT estimates, offering insights to improve climate model projections and deepen our understanding of ocean-climate interactions.
