EGU21-10045, updated on 04 Mar 2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-10045
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Estimating the air-sea gas transfer velocity from a statistical reconstruction of ocean turbulence observations

Giulia Carella1, Leonie Esters2, Martí Galí Tàpias1, Carlos Gomez Gonzalez1, and Raffaele Bernardello1
Giulia Carella et al.
  • 1Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain (giulia.carella@bsc.es)
  • 2Uppsala University, Sweden

Although the air-sea gas transfer velocity k is usually parameterized with wind speed, the so-called small-eddy model suggests a relationship between k and the ocean surface turbulence in the form of the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy ε. However, available observations of ε from oceanographic cruises are spatially and temporally sparse. In this study, we use a Gaussian Process (GP) model to investigate the relationship between the observed profiles of ε and co-located atmospheric and oceanic fields from the ERA5 reanalysis. The model is then used to construct monthly maps of ε and to estimate the climatological air-sea gas transfer velocity from existing parametrizations. As an independent  validation,  the same model is also trained on EC-Earth3 outputs with the objective of reproducing the temporal and spatial patterns of turbulence kinetic energy as simulated by EC-Earth3. The ability to predict ε is instrumental to achieve better estimates of air-sea gas exchange that take into account multiple sources of upper ocean turbulence beyond wind stress.

How to cite: Carella, G., Esters, L., Galí Tàpias, M., Gomez Gonzalez, C., and Bernardello, R.: Estimating the air-sea gas transfer velocity from a statistical reconstruction of ocean turbulence observations, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-10045, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-10045, 2021.

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