Experiments carried out at three different laboratory facilities at varying airflow velocities and wave fetches were used to investigate the characteristics of bag-breakup fragmentation events, which is the dominant mechanism for generating sea surface spray during hurricane-force winds. The following parameters were determined: (1) the width of the fragmentation domain, which is the band near the breaking wave crest where fragmentation events occur, and (2) the number of fragmentation events per unit area of this domain. Universal dependences of the number of bag-breakup-type events on the dimensionless parameters of the system were obtained. Based on these dependences, as well as the known statistics on the lengths of breaking wave crests under field conditions, the number of fragmentation events under field conditions was determined, which in turn allowed us to propose a new spray generation function (SGF) due to bag-breakup type fragmentation. It was shown that the droplet volume flux obtained using the new SGF increases rapidly with increasing wind speed, exceeding previously obtained estimates due to accounting for a large number of giant droplets. Estimates of the spray-mediated enthalpy and momentum fluxes using the bag-breakup SGF revealed that, at hurricane wind speeds, these fluxes can exceed those coming directly from the ocean surface.
Troitskaya et al. (Wed,) studied this question.