Sea spray can contribute significantly to the exchanges of heat and momentum across the air–sea interface. However, while critical, sea spray physics are typically not included in operational atmospheric and oceanic models due to large uncertainties in their parameterizations. In large part, this is because of the scarcity of in-situ sea spray observations which prevent rigorous validation of existing sea spray models. Moreover, while sea spray is critically produced through the fundamental interactions between wind and waves, traditionally, sea spray models are parameterized in terms of wind properties only. In this study, we present novel in-situ observations of sea spray derived from a laser altimeter through the adoption of the Beer–Lambert law. Observations of sea spray cover a broad range of wind and wave properties and are used to develop a wind–wave-dependent sea spray volume flux model. Improved performance of the model is observed when wave properties are included, in contrast to a parameterization based on wind properties alone. The novel in-situ sea spray observations and the predictive model derived here are consistent with the classic spray model in both trend and magnitude. Our model and novel observations provide opportunities to improve the prediction of air–sea fluxes in operational weather forecasting models.

While sea spray can significantly impact air–sea heat fluxes, the effect of spray produced by the interaction of wind and waves is not explicitly addressed in current operational numerical models. In the present work, the thermal effects of the sea spray were investigated for an idealized tropical cyclone (TC) through the implementation of different sea spray models into a coupled air–sea–wave numerical system. Wave-Reynolds-dependent and wave-steepness-dependent sea spray models were applied to test the sensitivity of local wind, wave, and ocean fields of this TC system. Results show that while the sensible heat fluxes decreased by up to 231 W m−2 (364%) and 159 W m−2 (251%), the latent heat fluxes increased by up to 359 W m−2 (89%) and 263 W m−2 (76%) in the simulation period, respectively. This results in an increase of the total heat fluxes by up to 135 W m−2 (32%) and 123 W m−2 (30%), respectively. Based on different sea spray models, sea spray decreases the minimum sea level pressure by up to 7 hPa (0.7%) and 8 hPa (0.8%), the maximum wind speed increases by up to 6.1 m s−1 (20%) and 5.7 m s−1 (19%), the maximum significant wave height increases by up to 1.1 m (17%) and 1.6 m (25%), and the minimum sea surface temperature decreases by up to 0.2 °C (0.8%) and 0.15 °C (0.6%), respectively. As the spray has such significant impacts on atmospheric and oceanic environments, it needs to be included in TC forecasting models.

While tropical cyclone (TC) track forecasts have improved over the last three decades, the mean absolute errors of TC intensity forecasts have stagnated (