Identification

Title

Impact of dominant breaking waves on air-sea momentum exchange and boundary layer turbulence at high winds

Abstract

Large-eddy simulation (LES) is used to investigate how dominant breaking waves in the ocean under hurricane-force winds affect the drag and near-surface airflow turbulence. The LES explicitly resolves the wake turbulence produced by dominant-scale breakers. Effects of unresolved roughness such as short breakers, nonbreaking waves, and sea foam are modeled as the subgrid-scale drag. Compared to the laboratory conditions previously studied using the same method, dominant-scale breakers in open-ocean conditions are less frequent, and the subgrid-scale drag is more significant. Nevertheless, dominant-scale breakers are more fully exposed to high winds and produce more intense wakes individually. As a result, they support a large portion of the total drag and significantly influence the turbulence for many ocean conditions that are likely to occur. The intense wake turbulence is characterized by flow separation, upward bursts of wind, and upward flux of the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), all of which may influence sea spray dispersion. Similarly to the findings in the laboratory conditions, high production of wake turbulence shortcuts the inertial energy cascade, causes high TKE dissipation, and contributes to the reduction of the drag coefficient. The results also indicate that if the drag coefficient decreases with increasing wind at very high winds, as some recent observations suggest, then the unresolved roughness must also decrease.

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document

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http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d70c4wqm

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Dataset language

eng

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geoscientificInformation

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title

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reference date

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publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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publication

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2014-04-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2014 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

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pointOfContact

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