A methodology is demonstrated to exploit the polarization sensitivity of high‐resolution radar measurements to interpret and quantify upper ocean dynamics. This study particularly illustrates the potential of quad‐polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) measurements. The analysis relies on essential characteristics of the electromagnetic scattering mechanisms and hydrodynamical principles. As the relaxation scale of centimeter‐scale ocean surface scatters is typically small, radar signal anomalies associated with surface manifestations of the upper ocean dynamics on spatial scales exceeding 100 m are mostly dominated by nonresonant and nonpolarized scatters. These “scalar” contributions can thus efficiently trace local breaking and near‐breaking areas, caused by surface current variations. Using dual copolarized measurements, the polarized Bragg‐type radar scattering is isolated by considering the difference (PD) between vertically and horizontally polarized radar signals. The nonpolarized (NP) contribution associated with wave breaking is then deduced, using the measured polarization ratio (PR) between polarized signals. Considering SAR scenes depicting various surface manifestations of the upper ocean dynamics (internal waves, mesoscale surface current features, and SST front), the proposed methodology and set of decompositions (PD, PR, and NP) efficiently enable the discrimination between surface manifestation of upper ocean dynamics and wind field variability. Applied to quad‐polarized SAR images, such decompositions further provide unique opportunities to more directly assess the cross‐polarized (CP for HV or VH) signal sensitivity to surface roughness changes. As demonstrated, such an analysis unambiguously demonstrates and quantitatively evaluates the relative impact of breakers on cross‐polarized signals under low to moderate wind conditions.

The impact of ocean spray on the dynamics of the marine near-surface air boundary layer (MABL) in conditions of very high (hurricane) wind speeds is investigated. Toward this end, a model of the MABL in the presence of sea-spume droplets is developed. The model is based on the classical theory of the motion of suspended particles in a turbulent flow, where the mass concentration of droplets is not mandatory small. Description of the spume-droplet generation assumes that they, being torn off from breaking waves, are injected in the form of a jet of spray into the airflow at the altitude of breaking wave crests. The droplets affect the boundary-layer dynamics in two ways: via the direct impact of droplets on the airflow momentum forming the so-called spray force, and via the impact of droplets on the turbulent mixing through stratification. The latter is parametrized applying the Monin–Obukhov similarity theory. It is found that the dominant impact of droplets on the MABL dynamics appears through the action of the ‘spray force’ originated from the interaction of the ‘rain of spray’ with the wind velocity shear, while the efficiency of the stratification mechanism is weaker. The effect of spray leads to an increase in the wind velocity and suppression of the turbulent wind stress in the MABL. The key issue of the model is a proper description of the spume-droplet generation. It is shown that, after the spume-droplet generation is fitted to the observations, the MABL model is capable of reproducing the fundamental experimental finding—the suppression of the surface drag at very high wind speeds. We found that, at very high wind speeds, a thin part of the surface layer adjacent to the surface turns into regime of limited saturation with the spume droplets, resulting in the levelling off of the friction velocity and decrease of the drag coefficient as ${U_{10}^{-2}, U_{10}}$ being the wind speed at 10-m height.

Multi-year field measurements of sea surface Ka-band dual-co-polarized (vertical transmit–receive polarization (VV) and horizontal transmit–receive polarization (HH)) radar Doppler characteristics from an oceanographic platform in the Black Sea are presented. The Doppler centroid (DC) estimated using the first moment of 5 min averaged spectrum, corrected for measured sea surface current, ranges between 0 and ≈1 m/s for incidence angles increasing from 0 to ${70}^{\circ }$ . Besides the known wind-to-radar azimuth dependence, the DC can also depend on wind-to-dominant wave direction. For co-aligned wind and waves, a negative crosswind DC residual is found, ≈−0.1 m/s, at ≈20 ${}^{\circ }$ incidence angle, becoming negligible at ≈ 60 ${}^{\circ }$ , and raising to, ≈+0.5 m/s, at ${70}^{\circ }$ . For our observations, with a rather constant dominant wave length, the DC is almost wind independent. Yet, results confirm that, besides surface currents, the DC encodes an expected wave-induced contribution. To help the interpretation, a two-scale model (KaDOP) is proposed to fit the observed DC, based on the radar modulation transfer function (MTF) previously developed for the same data set. Assuming universal spectral shape of energy containing sea surface waves, the wave-induced DC contribution is then expressed as a function of MTF, significant wave height, and wave peak frequency. The resulting KaDOP agrees well with independent DC data, except for swell-dominated cases. The swell impact is estimated using the KaDOP with a modified empirical MTF.

A revised wind‐over‐wave‐coupling model is developed to provide a consistent description of the sea surface drag and heat/moister transfer coefficients, and associated wind velocity and temperature profiles. The spectral distribution of short wind waves in the decimeter to a few millimeters range of wavelengths is introduced based on the wave action balance equation constrained using the Yurovskaya et al. (2013) optical field wave measurements. The model is capable to reproduce fundamental statistical properties of the sea surface, such as the mean square slope and the spectral distribution of breaking crests length. The surface stress accounts for the effect of airflow separation due to wave breaking, which enables a better fit of simulated form drag to observations. The wave breaking controls the overall energy losses for the gravity waves, but also the generation of shorter waves including the parasitic capillaries, thus enhancing the form drag. Breaking wave contribution to the form drag increases rapidly at winds above 15 m/s where it exceeds the nonbreaking wave contribution. The overall impact of wind waves (breaking and nonbreaking) leads to a sheltering of the near‐surface layer where the turbulent mixing is suppressed. Accordingly, the air temperature gradient in this sheltered layer increases to maintain the heat flux constant. The resulting deformation of the air temperature profile tends to lower the roughness scale for temperature compared to its value over the smooth surface.