Mass Transfer at the Ocean–Atmosphere Interface: The Role of Wave Breaking, Droplets, and Bubbles

By Luc Deike. Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, 2021

257 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Breaking waves modulate the transfer of energy, momentum, and mass between the ocean and atmosphere, controlling processes critical to the climate system, from gas exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen to the generation of sea spray aerosols that can be transported in the atmosphere and serve as cloud condensation nuclei. The smallest components, i.e., drops and bubbles generated by breaking waves, play an outsize role. This fascinating problem is characterized by a wide range of length scales, from wind forcing the wave field at scales of 𝒪(1 km–0.1 m) to the dynamics of wave breaking at 𝒪(10–0.1 m); air bubble entrainment, dynamics, and dissolution in the water column at 𝒪(1 m–10 μm); and bubbles bursting at 𝒪(10 mm–1 μm), generating sea spray droplets at 𝒪(0.5 mm–0.5 μm) that are ejected into atmospheric turbulent boundary layers. I discuss recent progress to bridge these length scales, identifying the controlling processes and proposing a path toward mechanistic parameterizations of air–sea mass exchange that naturally accounts for sea state effects. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Volume 54 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4f8f47d5c585827715b219aec444be1e91eb3b6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

  1. A-Man Zhang
  2. Shi-Min Li
  3. Yunlong Liu
  4. Shuaitong Li
  5. P. Cui

Citations in the corpus