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Atmospheric boundary layer over steep surface waves

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Abstract

Turbulent air-sea interactions coupled with the surface wave dynamics remain a challenging problem. The needs to include this kind of interaction into the coupled environmental, weather and climate models motivate the development of a simplified approximation of the complex and strongly nonlinear interaction processes. This study proposes a quasi-linear model of wind-wave coupling. It formulates the approach and derives the model equations. The model is verified through a set of laboratory (direct measurements of an airflow by the particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique) and numerical (a direct numerical simulation (DNS) technique) experiments. The experiments support the central model assumption that the flow velocity field averaged over an ensemble of turbulent fluctuations is smooth and does not demonstrate flow separation from the crests of the waves. The proposed quasi-linear model correctly recovers the measured characteristics of the turbulent boundary layer over the waved water surface.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by grant of the government of the Russian Federation (contract 11.G34.31.0048), Federal Targeted Program “Scientific and Pedagogical Staff for Innovative Russia” for 2009–2013 and by RFBR (13-05-00865, 13-05-97068, 13-05-12093) and by the bilateral Norwegian-Russian project CLIMARC. Alexander Kandaurov and Olga Ermakova acknowledge partial support from Russian Science Foundation (Agreement No. 14-17-00667).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Applied Physics, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

    Yuliya Troitskaya, Daniil A. Sergeev, Oleg Druzhinin, Alexander A. Kandaurov, Olga S. Ermakova & Ekaterina V. Ezhova

  2. Lobachevsky Nizhny Novgorod State University, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

    Yuliya Troitskaya, Daniil A. Sergeev, Oleg Druzhinin, Alexander A. Kandaurov, Olga S. Ermakova, Ekaterina V. Ezhova & Sergej Zilitinkevich

  3. Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, Bergen, Norway

    Igor Esau & Sergej Zilitinkevich

  4. Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland

    Sergej Zilitinkevich

  5. Division of Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Sergej Zilitinkevich

Authors
  1. Yuliya Troitskaya
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  2. Daniil A. Sergeev
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  3. Oleg Druzhinin
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  4. Alexander A. Kandaurov
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  5. Olga S. Ermakova
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  6. Ekaterina V. Ezhova
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  7. Igor Esau
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  8. Sergej Zilitinkevich
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuliya Troitskaya.

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Responsible Editor: Huijie Xue

This article is part of the Topical Collection on the 5th International Workshop on Modelling the Ocean (IWMO) in Bergen, Norway 17-20 June 2013

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Troitskaya, Y., Sergeev, D.A., Druzhinin, O. et al. Atmospheric boundary layer over steep surface waves. Ocean Dynamics 64, 1153–1161 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-014-0743-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-014-0743-4

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