Does it get it’s heat primarily from an exchange of heat at the surface or is it more radiant heat where the suns rays warm the ocean?
Aside from localized heating from deep sea hydrothermal vents and oceanic hotspots, net heating of ocean is heated essentially exclusively from direct solar radiation. The oceans have extremely high heat capacity because both the density of water and the effects of convective heat transfer, while the land mass has extremely low heat capacity because it is not very dense and serves as a good insulator; this difference is to the extent that at least in terms of global effects you can essentially ignore the heating of land area even though it is almost 30% of the Earth’s surface area. (Obviously land has more local impacts and the terrain features affect atmospheric flows, but these are lost in the noise at the first approximation for global temperature estimates.)
The ocean actually serves to heat and cool the atmosphere primarily by evaporation and is therefore the most significant driver of climate effects and major weather patterns versus radiation:
Table 2-2. Components of the Globally and Annually Averaged Surface Energy Budget
| Absorbed solar (SW) | 161 W⋅m-2 |
| Downward infrared (LW ↓) | 333 W⋅m-2 |
| Upward infrared (LW ↑) | -396 W⋅m-2 |
| Net longwave (LW) | -63 W⋅m-2 |
| Net radiation (SW + LW) | 98 W⋅m-2 |
| Latent heat (LH) | -80 W⋅m-2 |
| Sensible heat (SH) | -17 W⋅m-2 |
From An Introduction To The Global Circulation Of The Atmosphere (D. Randall, Princeton University Press, 2015)
As can be seen, the longwave (infrared) radiative budget is actually negative, and the Earth gives up most of the energy that it takes in, which is fortunate because if it did not the surface of the Earth would rapidly become more like Venus. However, the oceans only have a certain amount of thermal throughput capacity because of the limits of mixing and circulation, and excess heating results in greater evaporation, which in turn results in more precipitation and greater intensity of tropical storms and oscillations of the polar vortices. This is also a concern because as the oceans uptake more thermal energy due to net decrease in infrared cooling from greenhouse gas accumulation in the upper atmosphere, that energy will be stored in the oceans for decades to come, so even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases today we would still see increasing atmospheric heating and other climate effects notwithstanding all of the feedback loops from melting polar and land ice; desiccation wetlands, grasslands, and destruction of tropical and subtropical forests; and release of methane clathrates and methane stored in tundra permafrost.
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