Collaborative Research: Investigations of Wind-Driven Exchange and Long-Wave Modulation of Surface Fluxes Under Strong Wind Conditions Using OOI Data

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The Ocean Observatory Initiative (OOI) has been developed by NSF to provide continuous measurements at a wide variety of locations for unprecedented access to the world's oceans and marine atmospheric environment. A major theme of the OOI is Ocean-Atmosphere Exchange, which was identified during OOI planning as "critical to improving the predictive capabilities of storm forecasting and climate-change models." This project will allow access to new quality-controlled and continuous high-wind measurement of fluxes, waves and ocean currents at the OOI DC flux moorings under moderate to high wind conditions - data that should open new windows for evaluation of these forecast models as well as support for ongoing and future process studies at the OOI Pioneer, Endurance and Global sites. This project will take advantage of these observations to improve our detailed understanding of the interaction between the atmosphere, the surface wave field, and the underlying ocean, as well as to test, improve and validate parameterizations which estimate the critically important wind stress as a function of other, more easily observed or modeled parameters. Expected broader impacts from this research include STEM training of high school students, an enhancement to the OOI research infrastructure, and increased partnerships between academia, industry and federal agencies. These will be achieved through participation in a WHOI program aimed at developing a senior-level capstone course in Oceanography for high school students, dedicated OOI flux data development activities to support expanded science investigation using these platforms, and provision to the broader research community of widely sought after high-wind condition field measurement datasets including wind stress and buoyancy flux. This research will investigate the turbulent exchange of momentum that drives waves and currents at moderate to extreme wind speeds. The primary objectives of this project are (1) validate and/or improve bulk air-sea flux algorithms that parameterize the momentum flux at moderate to high wind speeds to reduce the uncertainty resulting from the scarcity of measurements in the 15-25 m/s range; (2) conduct process studies to investigate wind-wave feedback mechanisms that address the impact of wave-age, wave-steepness and directional differences (e.g., between the wind, wave and stress fields) using OOI directional wave spectral data and high-rate co-spectral flux estimates; and (3) use the sum of these investigations to test existing parameterizations of surface fluxes being employed in LES and numerical wind and wave modeling activities at several forecast centers. This study is expected to advance the evaluation and improvement of drag coefficient parameterizations and explore new ones based on physical arguments and insights gained from the continuous OOI measurements. The improvement of these parameterizations is a crucial component in the development of coupled ocean-wave-atmosphere models.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.