Adrian Matei edited observations.tex  about 10 years ago

Commit id: 00d40a78169d3e2634c7433b30d9db8eeb88fba9

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Our interest is to go right to source of whitecap variability and, therefore, of aerosol fluxes. Other fluxes, such as momentum fluxes especially, have no or little dependency on whitecap variability. One should dynamically couple whitecaps and bubble plumes characteristics in order to explicitly quantify aerosol production potential.  A range of several parameterizations for whitecap coverage have been performed. Whitecap fraction as a function of wind speed only is the most common, and it takes the form of a power-law relation between $W$ and ${U}_{10}$,   \begin{equation}  W = a{U^b}_{10}, a{U}^b_{10},  \end{equation} with coefficients $a$ and $b$ derived from a set of observations.  In order to obtain the whitecap fraction, one can refer to an average bubble persistence time $\tau_{bub}$ to obtain $W$: