Evaluation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Coupled‐Ocean Atmospheric Response Experiment (NOAA/COARE) air‐sea gas transfer parameterization using GasEx data

During the two recent GasEx field experiments, direct covariance measurements of air‐sea carbon dioxide fluxes were obtained over the open ocean. Concurrently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Coupled‐Ocean Atmospheric Response Experiment air‐sea gas transfer parameterization was developed to predict gas transfer velocities from measurements of the bulk state of the sea surface and atmosphere. The model output is combined with measurements of the mean air and sea surface carbon dioxide fugacities to provide estimates of the air‐sea CO 2 flux, and the model is then tuned to the GasEx‐1998 data set. Because of differences in the local environment and possibly because of weaknesses in the model, some discrepancies are observed between the predicted fluxes from the GasEx‐1998 and GasEx‐2001 cases. To provide an estimate of the contribution to the air‐sea flux of gas due to wave‐breaking processes, the whitecap and bubble parameterizations are removed from the model output. These results show that moderate (approximately 15 m s −1 ) wind speed breaking wave gas transfer processes account for a fourfold increase in the flux over the modeled interfacial processes.