Abstract
Air-sea turbulent heat fluxes play a fundamental role in generating and
dampening sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies. To date, the
turbulent heat flux feedback (THFF) is well quantified at basin-wide
scales (~20
W~m^{-2}~K^{-1}) but remains
unknown at the oceanic mesoscale (10-100 km). Here, using an
eddy-tracking algorithm in three configurations of the coupled climate
model HadGEM3-GC3.1, the THFF over mesoscale eddies is estimated. The
THFF magnitude is strongly dependent on the ocean-to-atmosphere
regridding of SST, a common practice in coupled models for calculating
air-sea heat flux. Our best estimate shows that the mesoscale THFF
ranges between 35 and 45
W~m^{-2}~K^{-1} globally,
across different eddy amplitudes. Increasing the ratio of
atmosphere-to-ocean grid resolution can lead to an underestimation of
the THFF, by as much as 75% for a 6:1 resolution ratio. Our results
suggest that a large atmosphere-to-ocean grid ratio can result in an
artificially weak dampening of mesoscale SST anomalies.