Ocean spray emissions by bubble bursting

Ocean spray aerosols are tiny water droplets and solid particles (from tens of nanometers to hundreds of microns) emitted at the ocean surface by wave breaking and bubble bursting. Ocean spray aerosols provide a pathway to transfer salt, biological material or microplastics from the ocean into the atmosphere, affecting the climate system through the radiative balance and the formation of clouds. In this talk, I will discuss various processes involved in controlling sea spray emissions, including wave breaking, bubble fragmentation in turbulence and individual and collective bubble bursting characterized through laboratory experiments and numerical simulations. We demonstrate that the salt aerosols produced by collective bubble bursting can be linked to individual bursting event when using the actual bubble population. We discuss how the presence of even small amount of surface contamination modulates the fluid dynamics of interface rupture and affect bubble fragmentation and bubble bursting and the resulting droplets being formed. Finally, I will discuss how recombining the multiple scales of the various processes involving in ocean-atmosphere interactions can be used to propose more robust flux formulations used in large Earth system models; and applied to emissions of other types of aerosols such as microplastics.