Statistics of bubble plumes generated by breaking surface waves

This dataset is an accompaniment to the paper titled "Statistics of bubble plumes generated by breaking surface waves" by Derakhti et al, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. It includes extensive observations from arrays of freely drifting SWIFT buoys and shipboard systems, enabling concurrent high-resolution measurements of wind, waves, and bubble plumes. This dataset allowed us to examine the dependence of the penetration depth and fractional surface area (e.g., whitecap coverage) of bubble plumes generated by breaking surface waves on various wind and wave parameters over a wide range of sea state conditions in the North Pacific Ocean, including storms with sustained winds up to 22 m s-1 and significant wave heights up to 10 m.  Notably, this study provides the first field evidence of a direct relation between bubble plume penetration depth and whitecap coverage, suggesting that the volume of bubble plumes could be estimated by remote sensing techniques.

Methods
This dataset was collected during an 18-day research cruise in the North Pacific Ocean in December 2019. The primary objective of the cruise was to conduct concurrent observations of breaking surface gravity waves and associated bubble plume statistics. A secondary objective was the replacement of a long-term moored wave buoy at Ocean Station PAPA (50°N, 145°W), which was reported as CDIP 166 and NDBC 46246. Hereafter, we refer to this dataset and cruise with the abbreviation PAPA. The PAPA cruise, conducted aboard the R/V Sikuliaq, departed Dutch Harbor, AK, on 5 December 2019 and ended in Seattle, WA, on 23 December 2019. Arrays of SWIFT buoys were deployed from the ship early in the morning and usually recovered later the same day, with most shipboard and autonomous measurements occurring during local daylight hours. Eastward transits continued overnight. Raw SWIFT data were collected in bursts lasting 512 seconds, with intervals of 12 minutes. Processed SWIFT data, including wave spectra and bubble plume statistics, are produced for each burst for each buoy. Subsequently, concurrent bursts are averaged across the buoys, typically involving four of them. This dataset includes a total of 599 processed data points at 12-minute intervals, spread across 14 daylight deployments. The statistics obtained from the shipboard measurements, such as wind speeds and whitecap coverage, represent 10-minute average values at times that the processed SWIFT data points are produced.