Abstract.A comparative study of simultaneous heat and gas exchange measurements was performed in the large annular Heidelberg Air-Sea Interaction Facility, the Aeolotron, under homogeneous water surface conditions. The use of two gas tracers, N 2 O and C 2 HF 5 , resulted not only in gas transfer velocities, but also in the measurement of the Schmidt number exponent n with a precision of ±0.025. The original controlled flux, or active thermographic, technique proposed by Jähne et al. (1989) was applied by heating a large patch at the water surface to measure heat transfer velocities. Heating a large patch, the active thermography technique is laterally homogeneous, and problems of lateral transport effects are avoided. Using the measured Schmidt number exponents, the ratio of the scaled heat transfer velocities to the measured gas transfer velocities is 1.046 ± 0.040, a good agreement within the limits of experimental uncertainties. This indicates the possibility to scale heat transfer velocities measured by active thermography to gas transfer velocities, provided that the Schmidt number exponent is known and that the heated patch is large enough to reach the thermal equilibrium.

Abstract. In a pilot study conducted in October and November 2011, air-sea gas transfer velocities of the two sparingly soluble trace gases hexafluorobenzene and 1,4-difluorobenzene were measured in the unique high-speed wind-wave tank at Kyoto University, Japan. This air-sea interaction facility is capable of producing hurricane strength wind speeds of up to u 10 = 67 m s −1 . This constitutes the first lab study of gas transfer at such high wind speeds. The measured transfer velocities k 600 spanned two orders of magnitude, lying between 11 cm h −1 and 1180 cm h −1 with the latter being the highest ever measured wind-induced gas transfer velocity. The measured gas transfer velocities are in agreement with the only available data set at hurricane wind speeds (McNeil and D'Asaro, 2007). The disproportionately large increase of the transfer velocities found at highest wind speeds indicates a new regime of air-sea gas transfer, which is characterized by strong wave breaking, enhanced turbulence and bubble cloud entrainment.

Abstract. In this study we present gas-exchange measurements conducted in a large-scale wind-wave tank. Fourteen chemical species spanning a wide range of solubility (dimensionless solubility, α = 0.4 to 5470) and diffusivity (Schmidt number in water, Sc w = 594 to 1194) were examined under various turbulent (u 10 = 0.73 to 13.2 m s −1 ) conditions. Additional experiments were performed under different surfactant modulated (two different concentration levels of Triton X-100) surface states. This paper details the complete methodology, experimental procedure and instrumentation used to derive the total transfer velocity for all examined tracers. The results presented here demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, and the derived gas-exchange velocities are shown to be comparable to previous investigations. The gas transfer behaviour is exemplified by contrasting two species at the two solubility extremes, namely nitrous oxide (N 2 O) and methanol (CH 3 OH). Interestingly, a strong transfer velocity reduction (up to a factor of 3) was observed for the relatively insoluble N 2 O under a surfactant covered water surface. In contrast, the surfactant effect for CH 3 OH, the high solubility tracer, was significantly weaker.

Abstract. Gas transfer velocities were measured in two high-speed wind-wave tanks (Kyoto University and the SUSTAIN facility, RSMAS, University of Miami) using fresh water, simulated seawater and seawater for wind speeds between 7 and 85 m s−1. Using a mass balance technique, transfer velocities of a total of 12 trace gases were measured, with dimensionless solubilities ranging from 0.005 to 150 and Schmidt numbers between 149 and 1360. This choice of tracers enabled the separation of gas transfer across the free interface from gas transfer at closed bubble surfaces. The major effect found was a very steep increase of the gas transfer across the free water surface at wind speeds beyond 33 m s−1. The increase is the same for fresh water, simulated seawater and seawater. Bubble-induced gas transfer played no significant role for all tracers in fresh water and for tracers with moderate solubility such as carbon dioxide and dimethyl sulfide (DMS) in seawater, while for low-solubility tracers bubble-induced gas transfer in seawater was found to be about 1.7 times larger than the transfer at the free water surface at the highest wind speed of 85 m s−1. There are indications that the low contributions of bubbles are due to the low wave age/fetch of the wind-wave tank experiments, but further studies on the wave age dependency of gas exchange are required to resolve this issue.

Abstract. Heat transfer velocities measured during three different campaigns in the Baltic Sea using the active controlled flux technique (ACFT) with wind speeds ranging from 5.3 to 14.8 m s−1 are presented. Careful scaling of the heat transfer velocities to gas transfer velocities using Schmidt number exponents measured in a laboratory study allows us to compare the measured transfer velocities to existing gas transfer velocity parameterizations, which use wind speed as the controlling parameter. The measured data and other field data clearly show that some gas transfer velocities are much lower than those based on the empirical wind speed parameterizations. This indicates that the dependencies of the transfer velocity on the fetch, i. e., the history of the wind and the age of the wind-wave field, and the effects of surface-active material need to be taken into account.