Measuring the sea surface heat flux and probability distribution of surface renewal events

The net sea surface heat flux is a crucial parameter for quantitative measurements of air-sea gas exchange rates, as well as for climate models and simulations. Current techniques used to measure heat fluxes are based on direct radiative schemes and micro-meteorological parameterizations. The long time averages required by the meteorological estimates tend to obscure short time and space scale events. Our technique uses a single infrared camera in order to quantitatively estimate the parameters of a surface renewal model of heat transfer.Through the use of spatio-temporal image processing techniques the material derivative of the sea surface temperature with respect to time can be used to compute both the heat flux density, as well as the probability density function of the underlying surface renewal model. First results of our technique obtained at the Heidelberg Aeolotron showed excellent agreement to ground truth data.