Influences of Polydisperse Sea Spray Size Distributions on Model Predictions of Air‐Sea Heat Fluxes

Peng, Tianze; Richter, David H.

doi:10.1029/2019jd032326

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Ocean spray is composed of small liquid droplets formed through two main pathways (Veron, 2015): the spume drops, produced from the tearing of breaking wave crests by strong winds (Ortiz‐Suslow et al., 2016; Troitskaya et al., 2018; Veron et al., 2012) and bubble bursting, itself decomposed into the film and jet drops production (Cipriano et al., 1983; Ghabache et al., 2014; Lhuissier & Villermaux, 2012; Spiel, 1997). These droplets transport water, heat, dissolved gases, salts, surfactants, and biological materials between the ocean and the atmosphere and these air‐sea fluxes are dependent on the drop size distributions (Mueller & Veron, 2014; Peng & Richter, 2020), while their chemical composition is affected by the production mechanisms (Cochran et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistics of Jet Drop Production

Berny

Popinet

Séon

et al. 2021

Geophysical Research Letters

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Knowledge of the size production flux of primary ocean spray droplets and aerosol particles and its dependence on meteorological and environmental variables is necessary for modeling cloud microphysical properties and the influence of aerosol on radiative processes (Bertram et al., 2018;de Leeuw et al., 2011;Quinn et al., 2015). Biases and uncertainties in predicting sea spray aerosols are related to a lack of fundamental understanding in the production processes of aerosols, and the large range of scales involved going from wave statistics at O (1 km-1 m), to the breaking dynamics at O (1-10 m), air bubble entrainment and bursting at O (microns-mm), which directly impacts our ability to perform weather prediction and earth system modeling (

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistics of Jet Drop Production

Berny

Popinet

Séon

et al. 2021

Geophysical Research Letters

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“…Several studies including Mueller and Veron (2014b) and Peng and Richter (2019) suggested that these assumptions overestimate the total sea spray-mediated flux due to smaller drops rapidly condensing and warming right before reentrance as they approach the sea even if they were able to thermally adjust to nearly their wet-bulb temperature at some point during their flight. Peng and Richter (2020) used Lagrangian particle simulations to look for interactions between drops of different sizes and found that large drops are more heavily concentrated near the bottom of the spray layer and can increase the moist enthalpy of the lower region to further reduce the net enthalpy contribution of small drops. Fairall et al (2009) found that the slope of the waves played an important role in determining whether large drops would spend a significant time aloft.…”

Section: The Enthalpy Fluxmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fairall et al (2009) found that the slope of the waves played an important role in determining whether large drops would spend a significant time aloft. Mueller and Veron (2014b), Richter et al (2019), and Peng and Richter (2020) all raised the concern that large drops may not be transported high enough to experience ambient conditions of T a , RH, or U 10 during their flight. One consideration is that most of these studies, with the exception of Mueller and Veron (2014b) who simulated 10-m wind speeds as high as 50 m/s, generally reported results for 10-m wind speeds below the high wind speeds that are primarily of interest in this study; at lower wind speeds, less sea spray is expected to be produced and the ejected spray is not expected to be lofted as high or remain aloft for as long.…”

Section: The Enthalpy Fluxmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, the nature of the near‐surface region at high wind speeds presents substantial challenges that inhibit surface flux calculations since the air‐sea interface is no longer well‐defined due to the presence of sea spray, bubbles, and foam (Emanuel, 2003; Holthuijsen et al., 2012; Sroka & Emanuel, 2021). Theoretical models, laboratory experiments, and numerical simulations have shown that the microphysical processes that govern sea spray generation, evaporation, and acceleration can have a significant effect on the large‐scale air‐sea exchange of enthalpy and momentum (Andreas & Emanuel, 2001; Jeong et al., 2012; Mueller & Veron, 2014a, 2014b; Peng & Richter, 2017, 2019, 2020; Troitskaya, Druzhinin, et al., 2018; Troitskaya, Kandaurov, et al., 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The microphysical model used in this study to calculate how drops evaporate and accelerate in response to the local conditions for a given residence time parameterization is described throughout Andreas (1989, 1990, 1992, 1995) and Andreas (2004) and is discussed in detail in Section 3. This model has been used to estimate sea spray fluxes in both small‐scale Lagrangian particle simulations (Druzhinin et al., 2018; Peng & Richter, 2017, 2019, 2020) and large‐scale numerical simulations of hurricanes (Garg et al., 2018). According to this model, the sea spray‐mediated enthalpy flux is primarily a function of the relative humidity, the air‐sea temperature difference, and the sea surface temperature, while the sea spray‐mediated momentum flux is primarily a function of the surface wind speed (Andreas, 2004; Andreas & Emanuel, 2001).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sensitivity of Sea‐Surface Enthalpy and Momentum Fluxes to Sea Spray Microphysics

Sroka

Emanuel

2021

JGR Oceans

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Accurate estimates of air‐sea enthalpy and momentum fluxes are critically important for hurricane intensity predictions. However, calculating these fluxes is challenging due to the nature of the air‐sea transition region. At extreme wind speeds, a substantial amount of sea spray is lofted making it necessary to calculate the sea spray‐mediated enthalpy and momentum fluxes. These calculations rely on microphysical equations, which are sensitive to the details of the local environmental conditions. Here we use a microphysical model to show that there exists a threshold wind speed beyond which the net sea spray‐mediated enthalpy and momentum fluxes are well‐approximated by using the net sea spray mass flux alone. This result supports the hypothesis that at extreme wind speeds, the ratio of the air‐sea exchange coefficients becomes independent of wind speed, implying the air‐sea flux calculations can be substantially simplified.

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Large‐Eddy Simulation of Sea Spray Impacts on Fluxes in the High‐Wind Boundary Layer

Richter

Wainwright

2023

Geophysical Research Letters

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Although there have been considerable improvements in forecasting the track of tropical cyclones (TCs) over the past several decades, intensity forecasts remain challenging and improvements have lagged behind (Rogers et al., 2006). One challenge is that the understanding of air-sea exchange in high-wind regimes remains limited due to the logistical difficulty of taking measurements in these conditions. Further complications arise from a lack of knowledge on how the presence of sea spray affects the air-sea fluxes, and how this varies with wind speed (Veron, 2015). Improving parameterizations of air-sea fluxes in numerical models is of particular importance for reducing uncertainty in intensity forecasts (Sroka & Emanuel, 2021).Key parameters in air-sea exchange are the surface drag coefficient (C D ) and surface enthalpy flux coefficient (C K ), which are known to factor into the maximum storm potential energy and the maximum tangential wind speed (Emanuel, 1995). In numerical weather prediction (NWP) models C D and C K (or the individual heat and moisture coefficients, C H and C E , often assumed to be equal to C K ) are typically parameterized as functions of the 10-m wind speed (U 10 ). At high winds beyond roughly 30 ms −1 , however, the behavior of these flux coefficients are highly uncertain (Richter et al., 2016), and almost certainly not solely a function of wind speed. One factor in particular that is central to our understanding of the transfer of heat and momentum at high wind speeds is the presence of spray droplets. Spray mediation of air-sea fluxes has been the subject of many previous investigations, including theoretical, observational, and numerical modeling approaches, and a comprehensive review on the subject can be found in Veron (2015) or Sroka and Emanuel (2021). Although many numerical modeling studies have investigated the impact of spray on air-sea fluxes, most of these studies have relied on bulk estimates in which the net effect of spray is parameterized rather than handled explicitly.Here we investigate the impact of sea spray on the transfer coefficients for momentum, heat, and moisture, by performing simulations using a large-eddy simulation (LES) code coupled with a Lagrangian microphysical model. Paired simulations are performed with and without the presence of spray, across a range of wind speeds up

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Influences of Polydisperse Sea Spray Size Distributions on Model Predictions of Air‐Sea Heat Fluxes

Abstract: We improved the overestimation issue in bulk model for the total heat flux by con-8 sidering spray timescales. 9 • Using the volume-weighted mean size as a representative size could simplify the 10 quantifying of air-sea fluxes.

Cited by 5 publications

References 52 publications

Statistics of Jet Drop Production

Statistics of Jet Drop Production

Sensitivity of Sea‐Surface Enthalpy and Momentum Fluxes to Sea Spray Microphysics

Large‐Eddy Simulation of Sea Spray Impacts on Fluxes in the High‐Wind Boundary Layer

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