Abstract
Sea spray comprises liquid droplets that cover a broad range of radii, from 0.01 to 1000 μm. For field observations, it is difficult to measure the sea spray size distribution over the full range of radii, particularly as spray production is associated with extreme weather conditions. As a result, differences in magnitude of the sea spray production estimates reach 6 orders. In this study, the sea spray volume flux (SSVF) was measured by laser altimeters under Tropical Cyclone Olwyn in the Indian Ocean. The results show that the SSVF increases gradually with the wind speed and is approximately 2 orders of magnitude larger than the results of two laboratory experiments and existing sea spray generation functions. The SSVF is also influenced by the sea state. When the nondimensional significant wave height is factored in a new parameter \( {R}_B{\left({u}_{\ast}^2/{gH}_s\right)}^{1/3} \), the correlation coefficients are improved, increasing to 0.85 and 0.88. Finally, a new parameterization for SSVF generation function is proposed in terms of the nondimensional wave height and windsea Reynolds number RB.
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Acknowledgements
Data was kindly provided by Woodside Ltd, and the authors can be approached regarding the data used in this study. We thank the work and technical support from John Masters and the RPS engineering team, involved with measurements.
Funding
The lead author was supported by DISI Australia-China Centre under Grant ACSRF48199 and the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2016YFC1401403. AVB acknowledges the support of the Australian Research Council Discovery under Project DP170101328. Fangli Qiao is jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 41821004.
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Ma, H., Babanin, A.V. & Qiao, F. Field observations of sea spray under Tropical Cyclone Olwyn. Ocean Dynamics 70, 1439–1448 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-020-01408-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-020-01408-x