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Wind velocity and air-sea turbulent flux measurements made from shipborne instruments are biased due to the effect of the ship on the flow of air to the instruments. The presence of the ship causes the airflow to a particular instrument site to be either accelerated or decelerated, displaced vertically, and sometimes deflected slightly in the horizontal. Although recognized for some time, it is only recently that the problem has been addressed using three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models to simulate the flow over particular ships, quantify the effects of flow distortion, and hence correct the ship-based measurements. It has previously been shown that this improves the calculated momentum fluxes by removing disparities between data from different ships, or from instruments in different locations on the same ship. This paper provides validation of the CFD model simulations. Two research ships were instrumented with multiple anemometers located in both well-exposed and badly exposed sites. Data are compared to the results of model simulations of the flow at various relative wind directions and wind speeds. Except when the anemometers are in the wake of an upwind obstruction, the model and the in situ wind speed estimates typically agree to within 2%. Direct validation of the model-derived estimates of the vertical displacement of the flow was not possible due to the extreme difficulty of obtaining such measurements in the field. In this study, simulations of flows at 0Њ and 90Њ from the bow of the ship were made and displacements of about 1 and 5 m were found, respectively. These results were used to correct the in situ momentum flux data. In one case, the application of the different bow-on and beam-on corrections for vertical displacement successfully removed the disparity seen in the uncorrected data. In a second case, the beam-on vertical displacement overcorrected the flux results. This overcorrection could be caused either by uncertainties in the in situ estimate of the relative wind direction or by partial adjustment of the turbulence during the vertical displacement. The effects of flow distortion are found to vary only slightly with wind speed, but are very sensitive to the relative wind direction and, if uncorrected, can cause large biases in ship-based meteorological measurements (up to 60% for the drag coefficient). Model results are given for bow-on flows over 11 research ships (American, British, Canadian, French, and German).

A variety of physical mechanisms are jointly responsible for facilitating air‐sea gas transfer through turbulent processes at the atmosphere‐ocean interface. The nature and relative importance of these mechanisms evolves with increasing wind speed. Theoretical and modeling approaches are advancing, but the limited quantity of observational data at high wind speeds hinders the assessment of these efforts. The HiWinGS project successfully measured gas transfer coefficients (k660) with coincident wave statistics under conditions with hourly mean wind speeds up to 24 m s−1 and significant wave heights to 8 m. Measurements of k660 for carbon dioxide (CO2) and dimethylsulfide (DMS) show an increasing trend with respect to 10 m neutral wind speed (U10N), following a power law relationship of the form: k660 CO2∼U10N1.68 and k660 dms∼U10N1.33. Among seven high wind speed events, CO2 transfer responded to the intensity of wave breaking, which depended on both wind speed and sea state in a complex manner, with k660 CO2 increasing as the wind sea approaches full development. A similar response is not observed for DMS. These results confirm the importance of breaking waves and bubble injection mechanisms in facilitating CO2 transfer. A modified version of the Coupled Ocean‐Atmosphere Response Experiment Gas transfer algorithm (COAREG ver. 3.5), incorporating a sea state‐dependent calculation of bubble‐mediated transfer, successfully reproduces the mean trend in observed k660 with wind speed for both gases. Significant suppression of gas transfer by large waves was not observed during HiWinGS, in contrast to results from two prior field programs.

[1] Over the ocean, eddy correlation measurements of the air-sea CO 2 flux obtained with open-path sensors have typically been an order of magnitude larger than those estimated by other techniques or sensors. It is shown here that this discrepancy is due to cross sensitivity to water vapor fluctuations: a novel correction procedure is demonstrated, tested against an independent data set and proved to be robust. After correction, the observed gas transfer velocities are in reasonable agreement with published values obtained using closed-path sensors or by tracer techniques. Data from open-path sensors may now be used for air-sea CO 2 flux estimation, greatly increasing the information available on air-sea gas transfer velocity. Citation: Prytherch, J., M. J.Yelland, R. W. Pascal, B. I. Moat, I. Skjelvan, and C. C. Neill (2010), Direct measurements of the CO 2 flux over the ocean: Development of a novel method, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L03607,