Wind Speed and Sea State Dependencies of Air‐Sea Gas Transfer: Results From the High Wind Speed Gas Exchange Study (HiWinGS)

A variety of physical mechanisms are jointly responsible for facilitating air-sea gas transfer through turbulent processes at the atmosphere-ocean interface. The nature and relative importance of these mechanisms evolves with increasing wind speed. Theoretical and modeling approaches are advanc- ing, but the limited quantity of observational data at high wind speeds hinders the assessment of these efforts. The HiWinGS project successfully measured gas transfer coefficients (k660) with coincident wave sta- tistics under conditions with hourly mean wind speeds up to 24 m s21 and significant wave heights to 8 m. Measurements of k660 for carbon dioxide (CO2) and dimethylsulfide (DMS) show an increasing trend with respect to 10 m neutral wind speed (U ), following a power law relationship of the form: k