Quantifying energy dissipation due to wave breaking remains an essential but elusive goal for studying and modeling air‐sea fluxes of heat, gas, and momentum. Previous observations have shown that lifetimes of bubble plumes and surface foam are directly related to the dissipated energy. Specifically, the foam decay time can be used to estimate the timescale of the subsurface bubble plume and the energy dissipated in the breaking process. A mitigating factor is that the foam decay time can be significantly affected by the surfactant concentration. Here we present an experimental investigation of a new technique that exploits the thermal signature of cooling foam to infer wave breaking dynamics. The experiments were conducted in a laboratory wave tank using artificial seawater with and without the addition of a surfactant. We show that the time from the start of the breaking process to the onset of cooling scales with the bubble plume decay time and the dissipated energy, and is not significantly affected by the presence of additional surfactants. We confirm observations from the field of the spatial variability of the temperature of foam generated by an individual breaking event, which has implications for inferring the spatial variability of bubble plume depth.

中文翻译：

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碎波中残余泡沫的热学特征

在研究和建模空气，海洋的热，气和动量通量时，量化由于波浪破碎造成的能量耗散仍然是一个基本但难以实现的目标。先前的观察表明，气泡羽和表面泡沫的寿命与耗散的能量直接相关。具体而言，泡沫衰减时间可用于估计地下气泡羽流的时间尺度和破裂过程中耗散的能量。缓解因素是，表面活性剂浓度会显着影响泡沫的衰减时间。在这里，我们介绍了一项新技术的实验研究，该技术利用冷却泡沫的热学特征来推断破波动力学。实验是在实验室波浪池中使用人工海水进行的，添加和不添加表面活性剂。我们表明，从破裂过程开始到冷却水垢开始的时间与气泡羽流的衰减时间和耗散的能量无关，并且不受其他表面活性剂的影响。我们从现场确认了由单个破裂事件产生的泡沫温度的空间变异性的观察结果，这对于推断气泡羽流深度的空间变异性具有影响。