Aerosols, bubbles and gases

UCL is engaged in the physics of the bubbles that are formed underneath breaking waves out in the open ocean. Bubbles are an important component of the boundary between the ocean and the atmosphere. The sea and the sky are both enormous, and anything that is exchanged between those two enormous things has to go through a very thin layer at the surface of the ocean. And in lots of places (especially when it's very windy), that layer is full of bubbles. In particular, bubbles help the exchange of different gases in both directions across the boundary, and they also spit tiny particles (aerosols) up into the sky. These sorts of details are important in weather and climate models, and my aim is to provide to those models the basic information about how bubbles form and what they contribute.

The focus of this research is natural bubble coatings. These change the way bubbles are formed and destroyed, and they have a strong influence on the bubble's ability to transport gases and particles.