Air-sea heat and moisture fluxes modulate the surface energy balance and oceanic and atmospheric heat transport across all timescales. Spatial gradients of these fluxes, on a multitude of spatial scales, also have significant impacts on the ocean and atmosphere. Nevertheless, analysis of these gradients, and discussion regarding our ability to represent them, is relatively absent within the community. This letter discusses their importance and presents a wintertime climatology. Their sensitivity to spatiotemporal scale and choice of data set is also examined in the mid-latitudes. A lead-lag analysis illustrates that wintertime air-sea heat flux gradients in the Gulf Stream can precede the North Atlantic Oscillation by ∼1 month. A lack of observations and thus validation of air-sea heat flux gradients represents a significant gap in our understanding of how air-sea processes affect weather and climate, and warrants increased attention from the observational and modeling communities.

中文翻译：

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Air-Sea 热湿通量梯度


空气-海洋热湿通量调节了所有时间尺度上的表面能量平衡以及海洋和大气的热量传输。这些通量的空间梯度在多个空间尺度上也对海洋和大气产生重大影响。然而，对这些梯度的分析，以及关于我们表示它们的能力的讨论，在社区中相对缺乏。这封信讨论了它们的重要性并介绍了冬季气候学。他们在中纬度地区也研究了他们对时空尺度和数据集选择的敏感性。超前滞后分析表明，墨西哥湾流中的冬季气海热通量梯度可以比北大西洋涛动早 ∼1 个月。缺乏对气海热通量梯度的观测和验证，代表了我们对气海过程如何影响天气和气候的理解存在重大差距，因此需要观测和建模界给予更多关注。