Observing Ocean‐Atmosphere Fluxes From Autonomous Surface Vehicles

Abstract With the increasing use of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) to characterize the marine atmospheric boundary layer, better understanding and evaluation of the observations collected from these platforms is needed. We present here unique comparisons of measurements of bulk properties and air‐sea fluxes collected from ASVs right above the sea surface to state‐of‐the‐art observations from R/P FLIP over a broad range of environmental conditions. We find good agreement between the two platforms, suggesting that near surface observations from such wave following vehicles are suitable to estimate air‐sea fluxes using bulk formulas. This result is somewhat surprising, because the relatively low measurement height (1 m) is often below the wave crests. Possible interpretations are that the presence of waves does not violate the assumptions of the Monin‐Obukhov theory inherent in the TOGA COARE bulk flux formulas, or that the empirical fit of the Monin‐Obukhov stability functions somehow accounts for the wave effects.