Naeem Masnadi, Chris Chickadel, and  Andrew Jessup
The Thermal Signature of the Residual Foam in Breaking Waves

Quantifying energy dissipation due to wave breaking remains an essential but elusive goal for studying and modeling air-sea fluxes 
of heat, gas, and momentum. Previous observations have shown that lifetimes of bubble plumes and surface foam are directly related
 to the dissipated energy.  Specifically, the foam decay time can be used to estimate the timescale of the subsurface bubble plume 
and the energy dissipated in the breaking process. A mitigating factor is that the foam  decay time  can be significantly affected 
by the surfactant concentration. We present an experimental investigation of a new technique that  exploits  the thermal signature 
of cooling foam to infer wave breaking dynamics. The experiments were conducted in a laboratory wave tank using artificial seawater 
with and without the addition of a surfactant. We show that the time from the start of the breaking process to the onset of cooling 
scales with the bubble plume decay time and the dissipated energy, and is not significantly affected by the presence of additional 
surfactants. We confirm observations from the field of the spatial variability of the temperature of foam generated by an individual 
breaking event, which has implications for inferring the spatial variability of bubble plume depth.