A Study on the Foaming of Sea Water (11th report)

A Tentative Analysis of Wind Wave Data in View of the Foaming of Sea Water

Abstract

The present author treated tentatively the relation between the wind wave scales and the surface water temperatures in an open sea using the data of oceanographical observations taken at the Northern Fixed Point (39°N, 153°E) in the North Pacific Ocean in view of the foaming of sea water, and the following results were obtained;
(1) The general features of the annual variation in wind waves were discussed (§3).
(2) The probability (P3) of the appearance of the wind wave scale 3 has a tendency to decrease with increasing surface water temperature, that is to say, the lower the surface water temperature becomes, the stronger the foaming ability (§4).
(3) He defined a quantity S(= τh0), which is physically significant, in order to indicate the degree of foaming in actual cases, where r and h0 represent the half life and the initial height of foam layer, respectively. Using the values of the quantity calculated from the results of his laboratory experiments, he could ascertain that the relationship mentioned above holds good approximately (§5).