Enumeration of Dyck paths with air pockets

22 pages, 3 figures, 2 tablesWe introduce and study the new combinatorial class of Dyck paths with air pockets. We exhibit a bijection with the peakless Motzkin paths which transports several pattern statistics and give bivariate generating functions for the distribution of patterns as peaks, returns and pyramids. Then, we deduce the popularities of these patterns and point out a link between the popularity of pyramids and a special kind of closed smooth self-overlapping curves, a subset of Fibonacci meanders. A similar study is conducted for the subclass of non-decreasing Dyck paths with air pockets