Whitecap Foam: The Intersection of Fluid Dynamics, Chemistry, and Biology. What We Need To Know and How We're Going to Get There.

Whitecaps from breaking waves are scattered across the 71% of the Earth's surface covered by ocean. This ephemeral, two-phase flow increases planetary albedo, generates underwater sound, and is the source of sea-spray aerosol, which influences weather and climate through the mixing state of clouds. Despite over sixty years of study, many fundamental properties of whitecaps, such as time-evolving cell size distribution, aerosol production rate, and chemistry-modulated persistence, remain poorly understood. In this seminar, I will discuss why this information is important to current global climate modeling efforts and efforts to obtain it, including the recently commissioned Scripps Ocean-Atmosphere Research Simulator.