Dear Jonathan I defer to Roy about the various sea water temperature names.
It is physically meaningful to have a temperature which doesn't relate to any material layer. If there is no matter associated with it, it must have zero heat capacity, so the temperature is determined by requiring an exact balance of heat fluxes. For this to be possible, the heat fluxes concerned must depend on the temperature, which of course they generally do. Obviously this is an idealisation, but a surface interface temperature of this kind really can exist in a model, although it's not an observational quantity. A model can obtain such a temperature by solving simultaneously for the heat fluxes that are balanced at the interface. Best wishes Jonathan G _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
