Turbulent fluxes and transfer of trace gases from ship‐based measurements during TexAQS 2006

Air‐sea/land turbulent fluxes of momentum, sensible heat, water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ozone are discussed on the basis of eddy covariance measurements made aboard the NOAA R/V Ronald H. Brown during the Texas Air Quality Study (TexAQS) in August–September 2006. The TexAQS 2006 field campaign focused on air pollution meteorology associated primarily with ozone and aerosol transport in the Houston/Galveston region and the nearby coastal zone. The ship‐based complement of instrumentation was used for the boundary layer measurements over water (the Gulf of Mexico and various harbors/bay areas) and “over land” (specifically, 80 km inside the Houston Ship Channel). In this study we focus on direct comparisons of TexAQS 2006 flux observations with the Coupled Ocean‐Atmosphere Response Experiment (COARE) bulk flux algorithm to investigate possible coastal and urban area influences. It is found that the average neutral drag coefficient can be about an order of magnitude larger over very rough urban areas than over the sea surface. However, a similar effect was not observed for the scalar transfer; that is, the neutral Stanton and Dalton numbers do not change significantly over different footprint surfaces. Our data suggest that the TexAQS 2006 region was generally a sink for surface ozone whether over water or over land. The turbulent flux of carbon dioxide was mostly negative (uptake by the surface) for measurements over waters of the Gulf of Mexico and some bays, but the flux becomes positive (release to the air) for inland regions. Both ozone and carbon dioxide turbulent fluxes above land were larger in magnitude compared to the over water measurements.