Abstract
The formation of bubbles from breaking waves has a significant effect on air-sea gas transfer and aerosol production. Detailed data in situ about the bubble populations are required to understand these processes. However, these data are difficult to acquire because bubble populations are complex, spatially inhomogeneous, and short lived. This paper describes the design and development of a novel high-resolution underwater optical instrument for imaging oceanic bubbles at the sea. The instrument was successfully deployed in 2013 as part of the HiWINGS campaign in the North Atlantic Ocean. It contains a high-resolution machine vision camera, strobe flash unit to create a light sheet, and single board computer to control system operation. The instrument is shown to successfully detect bubbles of radii in the range 20-10 000 μm.
Highlights
B UBBLES in the ocean play an important role in many marine and atmospheric processes, including air–sea gas transfer [1], [2], marine aerosol production [3], and scavenging of surfactants [4]
Photographic techniques based on high-resolution image sensors have previously been used to measure bubble plumes at high void fractions and over a wide radii range in the laboratory and field
Bubble size distributions can be determined from the image frames by extracting the size of each individual bubble using an automated image extraction algorithm based on the Hough transform
Summary
Abstract—The formation of bubbles from breaking waves has a significant effect on air–sea gas transfer and aerosol production. Detailed data in situ about the bubble populations are required to understand these processes. These data are difficult to acquire because bubble populations are complex, spatially inhomogeneous, and short lived. This paper describes the design and development of a novel high-resolution underwater optical instrument for imaging oceanic bubbles at the sea. The instrument was successfully deployed in 2013 as part of the HiWINGS campaign in the North Atlantic Ocean. It contains a high-resolution machine vision camera, strobe flash unit to create a light sheet, and single board computer to control system operation.
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