A Global Surface Turbulence Heat Flux Dataset resolving tropical cyclones

Abstract

Abstract. The Global Surface Turbulence Heat Flux Dataset (GHFD) presents a dataset of surface latent heat flux and sensible heat flux, at spatial resolutions of 0.25°×0.25° and daily available from 1993 to 2023. The GHFD is generated using the IBTrACS, OISST, CCMP, Copernicus Marine, and ERA5 datasets, with the wind speed field adjusted to incorporate tropical cyclone (TC) information and using the COARE 3.6 algorithm to conduct the heat flux calculations. The GHFD includes seven meteorological elements at the air-sea interface, including surface latent and sensible heat flux, 2-m specific humidity, sea surface temperature, 2-m air temperature, sea surface salinity and 10-m wind speed. A comparison between GHFD and various flux products (J-OFURO 3, OAFlux, ifremerflux) in terms of the fundamental components is conducted with moored observation data, in-situ observation data, and high-resolution simulation data. Results show an improvement of GHFD compared to the other three flux products in resolving TCs. The GHFD dataset in NetCDF format is freely available for download at https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.24400 (Peng et al., 2025).