Drag coefficient for the air-sea exchange in hurricane conditions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a physical model for predicting the non-monotonic variation of the air-sea drag coefficient during hurricanes, using foam coverage and bubble size to improve accuracy over existing models.

Contribution

The model uniquely combines foam coverage and bubble size to predict the drag coefficient, enabling better hurricane wind interaction modeling using radiometric data.

Findings

Effective C_d agrees with field measurements

Model captures reduction of C_d at hurricane wind speeds

Uses optical and radiometric data for predictions

Abstract

A physical model is proposed for the prediction of the non-monotonic variation of the drag coefficient, C_d, with wind speed. The model approximates the effective C_d by the area-weighted averaging of the distinct drag coefficients associated with the foam-free and foam totally-covered portions of the sea surface, and identifies the roughness of the sea surface totally covered by foam with the foam bubble size. Based on the available optical and radiometric measurements of the foam fractional coverage and the foam bubble size, the present model yields the effective C_d which is in fair agreement with that obtained from field measurements of the vertical variation of mean wind speed (Powell et al., 2003), which showed a reduction of C_d with wind speed rising to hurricane conditions. The present approach opens new opportunities for modeling of drag coefficient in hurricane conditions by using radiometric measurements instead of direct wind speed measurements.