Abstract
The shipboard measurements of whitecap coverage (W) and the meteorological and oceanographic information from two cruises in the South China Sea and Western Pacific are explored for estimating W. This study aims at evaluating how to improve the parameterizations of W while considering the effects of currents and swells on wave breaking. Currents indeed affect W in a way that winds with following currents can decrease W, whereas winds with opposing currents can increase W. Then, 10-m wind speed over sea surface (U10) is calibrated by subtracting the current velocity from U10 when the propagating directions of winds and currents are aligned. By contrast, when the direction is opposite, U10 is calibrated by adding the parallel velocity component of the opposing current to U10. The power fits of W dependence on the U10-related parameters of U10, friction velocity, wind sea Reynolds number in terms of this calibrated-U10 obtain better results than those directly fitted to U10. Different from the effect of currents on W, wind blowing along the crest line of swells may contribute to the increase in W. The conclusions suggest that U10 should be calibrated first before parameterizing W in areas with a strong current or some swell-dominant areas.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the Hebei Agricultural University Research Project for Talented Scholars (No. YJ201835), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41806028), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2019M65206), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. N182303031). The efforts of the researchers who obtained and published the data adopted in this study are much appreciated. We thank the crew, scientists, and students in Dongfanghong 2 for the help in the process of collecting observation data.
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Liu, M., Yang, B., Jia, N. et al. Dependence of Estimating Whitecap Coverage on Currents and Swells. J. Ocean Univ. China 20, 512–520 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11802-021-4521-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11802-021-4521-x