There are few places on earth as dynamic as the boundary between ocean and atmosphere. This is where carbon dioxide is exchanged between ocean and air, where the air deposits plastics, sand, and atmospheric pollutants into the ocean, and where the ocean outgasses nitrous oxide and oxygen into the atmosphere, to name a few. Such air-sea fluxes influence multiple aspects of our climate, cycles such as the water and carbon cycle, trade winds, and even the ozone layer itself.
Gauging air-sea fluxes is a challenging affair, especially as many fluxes cannot be measured directly. Instead, a suite of “essential ocean and climate variables” is used to estimate fluxes.
Estimating heat fluxes, for example, requires high measurements of surface winds, surface humidity, air temperature, surface albedo (upward solar radiation), downward longwave radiation, longwave surface emissivity, and sea surface skin temperature.
Such measurements aren’t only vital for air-sea interface studies, but for configuring, calibrating, and improving ocean, climate, and weather models that we use to predict, plan for, and mitigate against changing conditions…
This story can be read in full at ECO (mobile friendly version here).
