Title:	Southern Ocean Fine-scale Interactions with the Atmosphere (SOFIA)
DNr:	NAISS 2026/3-255
Project Type:	NAISS Medium
Principal Investigator:	Marcel du Plessis <marcel.du.plessis@gu.se>
Affiliation:	Göteborgs universitet
Duration:	2026-04-28 – 2026-11-01
Classification:	10501 10509
Homepage:	https://marcelduplessis.github.io/sofia/
Keywords:

Abstract

Climate mitigation depends critically on quantifying how Earth’s excess heat is absorbed, stored, and redistributed, with over 93% of this heat entering the ocean via the air–sea interface. The Southern Ocean dominates this uptake, accounting for roughly 75–83% of global ocean heat absorption. Yet, major discrepancies of up to 40% persist among climate models due to biases in high-latitude wind representation and inadequate parameterization of fine-scale (1–100 km) vertical heat transport processes. The SOFIA project aims to identify and quantify the dominant mechanisms governing air–sea heat exchange and ocean interior heat transport in the Southern Ocean, thereby improving global climate predictability. We will test the hypothesis that large-scale heat uptake is modulated by intense atmospheric storms and fine-scale oceanic features such as eddies and fronts that control vertical heat transfer. To achieve this, our goal is to use the output from the high-resolution coupled ocean–atmosphere simulations (COAS, https://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC21/research/project16.html) using NAISS supercomputing resources, integrating new autonomous observational data from the remote Southern Ocean. We would like to access NAISS for data analysis only of the COAS simulation to examine fine-scale interactions at submesoscale resolution, requiring extensive parallel computation and data processing capacity. By combining numerical modeling with SWOT satellite altimetry and in situ observations, we aim to produce circumpolar estimates of vertical heat transport and quantify the processes controlling ocean heat storage. The outcomes will enhance model parameterizations used in climate projections and contribute to more reliable predictions of future ocean heat uptake and climate variability.