global ocean heat flux and evaporation products were provided by the WHOI OAFlux project (http://oaflux.whoi.edu) funded by the NOAA Climate Observations and Monitoring (COM) program.
Abstract
The OAFlux project is an ongoing research and development project for global air-sea fluxes. The project is committed to developing enhanced global estimates of air-sea fluxes of heat, freshwater, and momentum, with a goal of establishing a one-stop source for global ocean surface forcing datasets that serves the needs of the ocean and climate research community. The project focuses on efforts to improve the quantification of physical interactions and feedbacks between the ocean and atmosphere and gain an enhanced understanding of the role that these air-sea processes play in the global energy budget, water cycle, atmosphere and ocean circulation, and the Earth’s climate.
The OAFlux project is so called because it applies an objective analysis approach to take into account data errors in the development of enhanced global flux fields. The objective analysis denotes the process of synthesizing measurements/estimates from various sources. Such a process reduces error in each input data source and produces an estimate that has the minimum error variance. The OAFlux project uses the objective analysis to obtain optimal estimates of flux-related surface meteorology and then computes the global fluxes by using the state-of-the-art bulk flux parameterizations.
The OAFlux project aims to provide a consistent multi-decade global analysis of air-sea heat freshwater evaporation and momentum fluxes for use in studies of global energy budget water cycle atmosphere and ocean circulation and climate.