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Gas Transfer by Breaking Waves
Author(s) -
Deike Luc,
Melville W. Kendall
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2018gl078758
Subject(s) - breaking wave , entrainment (biomusicology) , bubble , environmental science , atmospheric sciences , wind wave , troposphere , air entrainment , meteorology , mechanics , wave propagation , geology , physics , oceanography , optics , rhythm , acoustics
The transfer of gases at the ocean‐atmosphere interface impacts weather and climate from local to global scales, with carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) key to marine life and ecosystems, and dimethyl sulfide affecting aerosols and atmospheric processes. However, the bubble‐mediated gas transfer, associated with breaking waves has remained poorly constrained. We present a spectral framework for bubble‐mediated gas transfer, computed from a mechanistic model for air bubble entrainment at the breaking wave scale combined with a chemical model. Gas transfer is upscaled to the ocean scale by evaluating air entrainment at all wave scales using wave and wave breaking statistics. The obtained CO 2 gas transfer velocity reproduces the variability of historical parameterizations and recent field measurements, with very good accuracy. We propose a wind‐wave parameterization that collapses all available data, which can be directly implemented in ocean‐wave models or used with remote sensing of the ocean surface to infer gas transfer.