Sea spray and the turbulent air-sea heat fluxes

Heat and moisture carried by sea spray have long been suspected of contributing to the air-sea fluxes of sensible and latent heat. Using time scales that parameterize how long sea spray droplets reside in the air and how quickly they exchange heat and moisture with their environment, I estimate sea spray contributions to the air-sea heat fluxes. To make these estimates, I first develop a new sea spray generation function that predicts more realistic spume production than earlier models. Spray droplets with initial radii between 10 and 300 μm contribute most to the heat fluxes; the vast majority of these are spume droplets. The modeling not only demonstrates how spray droplets participate in the air-sea heat exchange but also confirms earlier predictions that the heat carried by sea spray (especially the latent heat) is an important component of the air-sea heat balance. In my examples, the maximum magnitude of the spray latent heat flux for a 20-m/s wind is 170 W/m²; the maximum spray sensible heat flux is 33 W/m². For winds over 10 m/s, the spray latent heat flux is usually a substantial fraction of the interfacial (or turbulent) latent heat flux (estimated from the bulk-aerodynamic equations) and will thus confound measurements of the air-sea transfer coefficient for latent heat.