Atmospheric River Energy Flux: How Much of the Sky's Heat Transport Runs in Narrow Corridors

Atmospheric-river vapour transport is converted into energy. The latent power of one river is its integrated vapour transport times the latent heat of vaporisation (2.50e6 J/kg) times its effective width. A modest river (250 kg/m/s over 400 km) carries 250 TW of gross latent power, a typical landfalling river (500 kg/m/s over 500 km) carries 625 TW (0.625 PW), and a strong river (750 kg/m/s over 600 km) carries 1125 TW (1.125 PW). A typical river intercepts, gross, 12.5 percent of the 5 PW peak poleward energy transport and flows at 1.20 times the mass discharge of the Amazon. Projecting to poleward transport, four typical rivers per hemisphere covering 7.07 percent of the circumference at 45 degrees, at a meridional fraction of 0.6, carry 1.50 PW of poleward latent transport per hemisphere: 30.0 percent of the peak total transport and 78.9 percent of an adopted 1.9 PW peak latent transport. The full bracket, the peak-profile correction, and the peak-versus-mean limits are stated at full size in the paper. All numbers are produced by the deposited compute.py. AI use is disclosed: drafting and computation assistance was provided by Dave, an AI system built and operated under the author's direction. The author, William Alexander Aldred, directed the work and is sole author of record.