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Abstract

We analyse the changes in the air–sea fluxes of momentum, heat and fresh water flux caused by increasing the ocean–atmosphere coupling frequency from once per day to once per hour in the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model. We diagnose the relative influences of daily averaging and high-frequency feedbacks on the basic statistics of the air–sea fluxes at grid point level and quantify feedback modes responsible for large scale changes in fluxes over the Southern Ocean and the Equatorial Pacific. Coupling once per hour instead of once per day reduces the mean of the momentum-flux magnitude by up to 7 % in the tropics and increases it by up to 10 % in the Southern Ocean. These changes result solely from feedbacks between atmosphere and ocean occurring on time scales shorter than 1 day. The variance and extremes of all the fluxes are increased in most parts of the oceans. Exceptions are found for the momentum and fresh water fluxes in the tropics. The increases result mainly from the daily averaging, while the decreases in the tropics are caused by the high-frequency feedbacks. The variance increases are substantial, reaching up to 50 % for the momentum flux, 100 % for the fresh water flux, and a factor of 15 for the net heat flux. These diurnal and intra-diurnal variations account for up to 50–90 % of the total variances and exhibit distinct seasonality. The high-frequency coupling can influence the large-scale feedback modes that lead to large-scale changes in the magnitude of wind stress over the Southern Ocean and Equatorial Pacific. In the Southern Ocean, the dependence of the SST-wind-stress feedback on the mean state of SST, which is colder in the experiment with hourly coupling than in the experiment with daily coupling, leads to an increase of westerlies. In the Equatorial Pacific, Bjerknes feedback in the hourly coupled experiment reveals a diurnal cycle during the El Niño events, with the feedback being stronger in the nighttime than in the daytime and no clear diurnal cycle during the La Niña events. This asymmetry might lead to the decrease of wind stress in the Equatorial Pacific in the hourly coupled experiment. © 2016 The Author(s)