A sea spray aerosol flux parameterization encapsulating wave state.

A new sea spray source function (SSSF), termed Oceanflux Sea Spray Aerosol or OSSA, was derived based on in-situ sea spray measurements along with meteorological/ physical parameters. Submicron sea spray fluxes derived from particle number concentration measurements at the Mace Head coastal station, on the west coast of Ireland, were used together with open-ocean eddy correlation flux measurements from the Eastern Atlantic (SEASAW cruise). In the overlapping size range, the data for Mace Head and SEASAW were found to be in a good agreement, which allowed deriving the new SSSF from the combined dataset spanning the dry diameter range from 15nm to 6 μm. The sea spray production was parameterized in terms of 5 log-normal modes and the Reynolds number instead of the more commonly used wind speed, thereby encapsulating important influences of wave height and history, friction velocity and viscosity. This formulation accounts for the different flux relationships associated with rising and waning wind speeds since these are included in the Reynolds number. Furthermore, the Reynolds number incorporates the kinematic viscosity of water, thus the SSSF inherently includes a sea surface temperature dependence. The temperature dependence of the resulting SSSF is similar to that of other in-situ derived source functions and results in lower production fluxes for cold waters and enhanced fluxes from warm waters as compared with SSSF formulations that do not include temperature effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]