FAIRS Experiment: Fluxes, Air-Sea Interaction, and Remote Sensing

The FAIRS experiment took place aboard R/P FLIP from 15 September to 15 October 2000 approximately 120 nautical miles off Monterey, California. Our approach was to use both the passive and the active infrared techniques to determine the extent to which our laboratory findings are relevant to the field. Over the past several years, we have used these techniques to investigate wave breaking on spatial scales ranging from microscale breaking waves (0.1 to 1 m length) to large scale breaking waves, or whitecaps (1 to 100 m). When a cool skin layer is present, the wake of a breaking wave appears as a region of increased temperature because turbulence generated by the breaking process mixes warm water from below to the surface. As the turbulence decays, the cool skin layer reestablishes. The rate of recovery has been shown to depend on the strength of the turbulence that created the disruption as well as the net heat flux.