Occurrence and Evolution of Acoustically Relevant Sub-Surface Bubble Plumes and their Associated, Remotely Monitorable, Surface Whitecaps

A detailed description of the temporal evolution of a bubble plume, beginning with its genesis in a spilling wave, is essayed, and the early stages of its development are identified with the Stage A and Stage B whitecaps. The actual rate of plume formation is found to be proportional to the instantaneous fraction of the sea surface covered by whitecaps, and this fraction is in turn proportional to the cube of the friction velocity, u*. The related, and fully compatible, model for estimating the near-surface resident bubble population has now been revised to include the influence on bubble survival of the surface water saturation levels of the major dissolved atmospheric gases. The bubble spectrum predicted by this model is consistent with the large bubble end of the spectra measured at sea by Kolovayev (1976), Johnson and Cooke (1979), and Walsh and Mulhearn (1987).

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