Parameterization of Air-Sea Fluxes for High Wind Conditions

Abstract

The long-term goal is improved understanding of fundamental processes of turbulence and air-sea interactions. 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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 30, 2000
Accession Number
ADA610182

Entities

People

  • Christopher W. Fairall
  • J. E. Hare
  • R. J. Hill

Organizations

  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Application Software
  • Boundaries
  • Boundary Layer
  • Climate Change
  • Data Sets
  • Databases
  • Evaporation
  • Heat Energy
  • Latent Heat
  • Layers
  • Measurement
  • Momentum
  • Oceans
  • Roughness
  • Standards
  • Turbulence

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers