Parameterization of Air-Sea Fluxes for High Wind Conditions

The standard model for dealing with turbulence and air-sea interactions has three components: (1) The ocean surface can be characterized by its temperature and aerodynamic roughness. (2) Given (1) we can use the wind speed and air temperature/humidity to determine the air sea fluxes. All relevant properties of the profiles of the mean and turbulent fields in the surface layer can them be computed with scaling parameters derived from these fluxes using Monin Obukhov Similarity (MOS) theory. (3) The small-scale properties of the turbulence (structure functions and inertial subrange spectra) can be described solely in terms of the wavenumber/spatial separation and the dissipation rate and these are scaled by MOS.. Our objective is to investigate various physical processes that lead either to improvements in the representation of the standard model or to violations of the standard model and to develop new models that more thoroughly describe turbulent processes in the marine surface layer. For example, (1) is violated by sea spray, oceanic near-surface mixing processes, and interactions of the wind/stress vectors with the 2-dimensional ocean surface wave spectrum; (2) is violated by near the surface by interactions with waves and is violated far from the surface by intermittent processes associated with larger scale boundary layer dynamics and coherent structures