Marine aerosols produced by ocean internal waves

The objective of this work was to investigate the hypothesis that oceanic internal waves could modulate the production of atmospheric aerosols by modulating sea surface roughness. Airborne profiling lidar was used to measure the displacement of the subsurface scattering layer by internal waves, the distribution of surface roughness, and the aerosol concentration over the internal waves. The direct correlation between internal wave displacement and aerosol density was not statistically significant, primarily due to other processes causing mixing in the atmosphere. However, we found that the magnitude of the aerosol spatial power spectral density at the internal wave wavelength was significantly correlated with the internal wave magnitude. We developed a simple model to describe the interactions, which provided excellent agreement with the measurements for two out of three flights. The disagreement for the third flight is thought to be a result of the deeper thermocline on that day, which put the deeper parts of the internal waves out of the depth range covered by the lidar. The conclusion is that internal waves affect aerosol production over the ocean under certain environmental conditions. (c) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.