An Eulerian model for sea spray transport and evaporation

Fabrice Veron, University of Delaware, School of Marine Science and Policy, Newark, DE, United States and Luc Mieussens, University of Bordeaux, IMB, Talence, France
Abstract:
Sea-spray is known to be a fundamental component of air-sea heat flux in
high wind speed conditions where water drops are frequently ejected from the
sea surface because of breaking waves and breaking related phenomena such as
bubble entrainment and whitecaps. Once ejected from the ocean surface, these
drops are transported and dispersed in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL)
where they interact and exchange momentum, heat, and moisture with the
ambient atmosphere. However, understanding of these spray fluxes pathways,
and our ability to model them remains limited.
In this work, we borrow the framework from established kinetic gas theory,
and apply these mathematical tools to model the transport of spray droplets
and the exchanges of heat, momentum, and moisture between the drops and the
atmosphere. Within this framework, one of the most vexing component of this
spray flux problem, i.e. the feedback from the drops on the atmosphere, is
relatively straightforward to account for.
This work is largely exploratory and in the early stages of development. We
will present an overview of the approach as well as preliminary results.