title: Heat Transport Compensation in Atmosphere and Ocean over the Past 22,000 Years.
abstract: The Earth's climate has experienced dramatic changes over the past 22,000 years; however, the total meridional heat transport (MHT) of the climate system remains stable. A 22,000-year-long simulation using an ocean-atmosphere coupled model shows that the changes in atmosphere and ocean MHT are significant but tend to be out of phase in most regions, mitigating the total MHT change, which helps to maintain the stability of the Earth's overall climate. A simple conceptual model is used to understand the compensation mechanism. The simple model can reproduce qualitatively the evolution and compensation features of the MHT over the past 22,000 years. We find that the global energy conservation requires the compensation changes in the atmosphere and ocean heat transports. The degree of compensation is mainly determined by the local climate feedback between surface temperature and net radiation flux at the top of the atmosphere. This study suggests that an internal mechanism may exist in the climate system, which might have played a role in constraining the global climate change over the past 22,000 years.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies (LaCOAS) and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.|Qingdao Collaborative Innovation Center of Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao 266003, China.
authors.forename: Haijun
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies (LaCOAS) and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Yingying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies (LaCOAS) and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.|Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.
authors.forename: Zhengyu
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies (LaCOAS) and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.|Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, Brown University, Rhode Island 02912, USA.
authors.forename: Qing
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: Department of Physical Geography and Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Stockholm University, Stockholm 10691, Sweden.
authors.forename: Qiong
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhang