Microphysics of Air-Sea Exchanges

Abstract : The research efforts are targeted at improving our understanding of the microphysics of air-sea exchanges, especially the physics of the oceanic thermal skin and diurnally-influenced layers. This will lead to better assimilation of satellite-derived sea-surface temperature (SST) fields into meaningful climatologies and to more physically-based applications of satellite data to studies of air-sea interactions and to other naval applications. The constellation of the new generation of satellites with infrared radiometers for SST measurements has a range of local over-pass times and, because of the diurnally forced fluctuation in SST and of the fluctuations of the skin effect in response to differing air-sea fluxes, this creates a problem in combining these fields into a reliable, consistent composite analysis. The results of this new research will improve the reliability of such composite analyses for naval applications.