Earth's surface heat flux
By J. Huw Davies, David Rhodri Davies. 2009
430 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract. We present a revised estimate of Earth's surface heat flux that is based upon a heat flow data-set with 38 347 measurements, which is 55% more than used in previous estimates. Our methodology, like others, accounts for hydrothermal circulation in young oceanic crust by utilising a half-space cooling approximation. For the rest of Earth's surface, we estimate the average heat flow for different geologic domains as defined by global digital geology maps; and then produce the global estimate by multiplying it by the total global area of that geologic domain. The averaging is done on a polygon set which results from an intersection of a 1 degree equal area grid with the original geology polygons; this minimises the adverse influence of clustering. These operations and estimates are derived accurately using methodologies from Geographical Information Science. We consider the virtually un-sampled Antarctica separately and also make a small correction for hot-spots in young oceanic lithosphere. A range of analyses is presented. These, combined with statistical estimates of the error, provide a measure of robustness. Our final preferred estimate is 47±2 TW, which is greater than previous estimates.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Geophysics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/abb6678ec7813dc04c09b454429aa9552f83402e
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In Artificial Intelligence
In Geophysics
- F. Lucazeau
- J. A. Connolly
- J. C. Afonso
- William L Griffin
- S. O’Reilly
- A. Jones
- Yingjie Yang
- Javier Fullea
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- 3‐D multiobservable probabilistic inversion for the compositional and thermal structure of the lithosphere and upper mantle. I: a priori petrological information and geophysical observables (2013, background): “[78] Surface heat flow measurements are expensive, particularly in continents, and therefore they are scarce and heterogeneously distributed [e.g., Davies and Davies, 2010].”
- Global map of solid Earth surface heat flow (2013, background): “, 2008] shows that the limitation of the half-space model at the ridge (predicts infinite heat flow) does not affect heat flow estimates [Davies and Davies, 2010].”
- Analysis and Mapping of an Updated Terrestrial Heat Flow Data Set (2019, methodology): “The most commonly used predictors are geology (Lee, 1965) and age (Chapman & Pollack, 1975); recent analysis using them include Davies and Davies (2010) and Davies (2013), while Artemieva (2006) exclusively used them for continents.”
- Measuring Global Ocean Heat Content to Estimate the Earth Energy Imbalance (2019, background): “If the climate system were free from external perturbations and internal variability during millennia, then the climate energy budget would be in a steady state in which the net TOA radiation budget compensates the geothermal flux of +0.08 Wm−2 (Davies and Davies, 2010).”
- The faint young Sun problem (2012, background): “Today, the globally integrated heat loss from the Earth’s interior (mostly originating from radioactive decay) amounts to less than 5× 1013 W [Pollack et al., 1993; Davies and Davies, 2010].”