The role of bubbles during air-sea gas exchange

Abstract

The potential for using the air-sea exchange rate of oxygen as a tracer for net community biological production in the ocean is greatly enhanced by recent accuracy improvements for in situ measurements of oxygen on unmanned platforms. A limiting factor for determining the exchange process is evaluating the air-sea flux contributed by bubble processes produced by breaking waves, particularly during winter months under high winds. Highly accurate measurements of noble gases (Ne, Ar & Kr) and nitrogen, N2, in seawater are tracers of the importance of bubble process in the surface mixed layer. We use measured distributions of these gases in the ventilated thermocline of the North Pacific and an annual time series of N2 in the surface ocean of the NE Subarctic Pacific to evaluate four different air-water exchange models chosen to represent the range of model interpretation of bubble processes. We find that models must have an explicit bubble mechanism to reproduce concentrations of insoluble atmospheric gases, but there are periods when they all depart from observations. The recent model of Liang et al. (2013) stems from a highly resolved model of bubble plumes and categorizes bubble mechanisms into those that are small enough to collapse and larger ones that exchange gases before they resurface, both of which are necessary to explain the data.