Wind-driven waves at the ocean surface represent an understudied component of the earth system affecting air-sea exchange and boundary layer processes with cumulative effects across all scales.…

This federal contract award, valued at $251,603.00, was made by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shared Services Center to the University of Washington (UW) to implement a spectrally resolved wind-wave component into the NASA GEOS-5 Earth system model. The goal is to improve the modeling of air-sea exchange processes, marine aerosol production, and the impacts on the marine boundary layer. This is not a set-aside contract. UW, a leading research university, has a history of supporting various federal agencies through contracts, grants, and subcontracts across healthcare, research, and technical domains. The contract has an ultimate completion date of August 8, 2023.

Wind-driven waves at the ocean surface represent an understudied component of the earth system affecting air-sea exchange and boundary layer processes with cumulative effects across all scales. Through tightly interdependent processes the interactions between wind and waves impact air-sea exchange of mass, heat and momentum. These processes have major implications for local, regional and global chemistry, atmospheric boundary layer structure, cloud microphysics, and radiative transfer thereby impacting the composition and structure of the marine troposphere. The ability to accurately capture these processes and collectively account for their impact on local, regional and global climate and climate extremes requires that the ocean wind-wave field be modeled explicitly. However, while software technology and computational power are permitting much better spatial and physical resolution of the earth system, the NASA geos earth system model (ESM) still parameterizes key processes such as marine aerosol production, heat and momentum transfer between atmosphere and ocean in highly simplified manner. Motivated by the need to explicitly resolve the air-sea interface in the geos system, we propose to implement a reliable spectrally resolved wind-wave component into the geos-5 to permit physically-based coupling between the ocean and atmosphere through wind-wave processes. The proposed research focuses on: accuracy of the wind-wave field within the geos-5, driven with reanalysis meteorology; production of primary marine aerosol (PMA); associated impact of sea spray on latent and sensible heat exchange, and impact of dynamically-linked ocean surface roughness on the marine boundary layer. The proposed study will be executed over four years with the following objectives: couple the university of miami wave model (umwm) into the geos-5 system. Engineer and implement a wave-driven air-sea exchange sub-component for enthalpy exchange and marine aerosol production. Test and evaluate marine aerosol production and burden, and associated feedbacks on aerosol and cloud processes. Test and evaluate enthalpy and dynamic impacts of wind-waves on marine boundary layer processes. Coupled testing of the impact and feedbacks of wind-driven enthalpy, dynamic, and aerosol processes.