Insights of Evaporative Droplets in High-wind Atmospheric Boundary Layer

Sea-spray droplets ejected into the air-sea boundary layer take part in a series of complex transport processes. To model the air-sea exchange of heat under high-wind conditions, it is important yet challenging to understand influences of evaporative droplets in the atmospheric boundary layer. We implement a high-resolution Eulerian-Lagrangian algorithm with varied droplets laden in a turbulent open-channel flow to reveal the dynamic and thermodynamic characteristics of droplets. Our past numerical simulations demonstrated an overall weak modification to the total heat flux by evaporative droplets, due to redistributed sensible and latent heat fluxes from relatively small droplets that respond rapidly to the ambient environment or the limited the residence time of larger droplets. However, droplets with a slower thermodynamic response to the environment indicate a potential to enhance the total heat flux, but it is dependent on concentration and suspension time. In the current study, we investigate more insights of droplets behavior. We focus on correlations between the resident time and thermodynamic statistics of droplets with the herein influence on heat fluxes, in both real and spectral space. In addition, we validate our results on different scales of turbulence, which will be helpful when applying the results into further practical parameterization.