LONG-TERM GOALS

The main goal of the proposed research is to study theoretically the role of the breaking wind waves and the sea spray, generated by them, under strongly forced situations in the airflow dynamics in particular in energy, momentum, heat and moisture transfers through the sea surface. Through this to increase the knowledge of the air-sea interaction and to apply this knowledge for developing improved, physics-based parameterizations of the fluxes (momentum, energy, heat and moisture) in the wave-coupled atmospheric boundary layer. The proposed study is essential to quantify the wave breaking effects on surface transfers, especially in the case of strong winds, where the sea spray generated by breaking waves is believed to play the dominant role in the airflow dynamics. The improved surface forcing (parameterizations of fluxes) is aimed at improvement of the performance of the high-resolution wave and coupled atmosphere-ocean models. The principle innovation of this study is that the airflow and wind waves are considered as a self-consistent interacting coupled system, where the properties of the sea surface (shape of the wave spectrum, wave breaking statistics, etc.) and turbulent characteristics of the atmospheric wave boundary layer are interrelated with each other