Direct Modelling of Sea Salt Aerosol Flux from Ocean Surface Stress with Model Comparison to Satellite Data

Our previous work modelling the surface flux of sea salt aerosol has relied on the 10 meter wind speed to calculate the flux. However, the 10 meter wind speed does not contain all the relevant information to calculate the surface flux. Therefore, we have developed a flux scheme based on the surface stress, which contains information on ocean surface roughness length and boundary layer stability. We model the generation, transport, and removal of the sea salt aerosol using CARMA, a 3D synoptic scale model. We drive our model with archived meteorological data from MATCH to simulate real events, and we compare our model results to land-based observations from AERONET and satellite-based observations from TOMS.