Abstract This paper presents physics improvements to the cool skin parameterization in the Coupled Ocean‐Atmosphere Response Experiment (COARE) bulk flux algorithm. The principal improvement is adopting a specification of the ocean side mixing profile that combines molecular and turbulent diffusivities via a form that allows turbulent dissipation to suppress turbulence near the interface. The turbulence is also scaled with the viscous friction velocity, since the stress input to waves is not realized continuously as turbulence at the interface but only intermittently at localized regions where the waves are breaking. Additional improvements include adopting a newer specification of the solar absorption profile in the ocean and incorporating the impacts of the rain sensible heat flux. The new parameterization is tuned to published observations of cool skin from a series of cruises and a recent publication of the turbo‐molecular mixing term deduced for observations of gas fluxes. Data from three recent ship‐based field programs, particularly the Propagation of Intraseasonal Oscillations in the Maritime Continent Region (PISTON) experiment, with radiometric sea surface and floating near‐surface temperature sensors as well as high‐quality air‐sea flux measurements were analyzed to evaluate the model. The improvements led to modest decreases in the nonsolar cool skin (∼16%) and in the solar heating contribution, both principally in light winds. The new model better reproduced mean nighttime cool skin amplitudes and was somewhat better than the previous COARE v3.6 model at reproducing the mean diurnal cycle. Overall, cool skin predictions for a large cruise database were reduced by ∼0.01°C.
Fairall et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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