Numerical Model’s Resolution Impact for Heat Exchange Interaction Over Agulhas Current

Where temperature gradients and heat losses are higher, variabilities in sea surface temperature and surface heat fluxes are induced by internal ocean processes. Theoretical models suggest that the correlation between temperature and heat fluxes can be used to distinguish sources of variability: ocean or atmosphere driven regimes. Here we used numerical model outputs with different resolutions to distinguish different regimes of variability and to investigate spatial resolution effects. We focused over the Agulhas Current region and the Eastern South Atlantic. There, waters flowing southward from the Indian Ocean along the eastern coasts of Africa generate turbulence. The mesoscale properties of the physical phenomena that occur in this area can be the key to find an ocean driven regime signal. Observations are used as comparison. The increase of resolution gives a better representation of the cross-covariance patterns and cross-correlation forms, indicating an improvement on the eddy-resolving capability. Their low-resolution counterpart fails to reconstruct the signal due to the ocean dynamics.