A Theory for the Global Wind Energy Dissipation Across Climates

Abstract

Atmospheric winds play a key role in shaping climate, ecosystems, and infrastructure. The energy that drives the winds is generated by the atmospheric heat engine. However, traditional entropy‐budget descriptions of this heat engine rely on poorly constrained microscale processes, limiting their predictive power. To address this, we introduce a framework to compute the wind work from only two climate‐dependent quantities: the height‐weighted integrated radiative‐cooling profile and a bulk Bowen ratio. Our results show that moderate global warming leads to only weak changes in wind work (and hence weak changes in global wind energy dissipation), due to a balance between increased height‐weighted radiative cooling and decreased bulk Bowen ratio. This result is in line with the relatively weak and inconsistent trends in wind energy dissipation found in comprehensive climate models and reanalyses. However, this balance is not predicted to hold over a wider range of climates, consistent with a much less energetic circulation in simulations of past Snowball Earth climates.