Principal investigators Penny Vlahos and Leonel Romero receive a grant from the National Science Foundation (award NSF OCE 2218781) to study the transfer of CO2 between the ocean and the atmosphere due spray and spume generated from breaking waves.

Objectives

This project builds upon the foundational Andreas Gas Exchange Spray model (AGES) developed through NSF project #1630846 for non-reactive gases by expanding its parameterizations to:

• O1) Include gas exchange of carbon dioxide (CO2) through sea spray.

• O2) Incorporate the entire carbonate system (carbonate and bicarbonate) associated with CO2 including alkalinity and pH profiles across sea spray drop evolution.

The project also seeks to build upon results of NSF projects #1924686 and #2121646 to:

• O3) Incorporate a physics-based sea spray model into the surface wave-breaking model efforts.

• O4) Combine the CO2 gas exchange component of the AGES model from O1 and O2 to the dynamic modeling framework in O3 to provide a tool for evaluating gas exchange in the Southern Ocean.