Junhong Liang
Florida State University, FL·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
When waves break at the sea surface, they inject clouds of tiny air bubbles into the water. Those bubbles dissolve as they are carried downward, and they move gases such as oxygen and carbon dioxide between air and ocean in ways that simple formulas based on wind speed do not capture.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
Engineering
- Topics
air-sea gas exchange
bubble-mediated gas transfer
ocean surface boundary layer
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Test whether stochastically distributed breaking waves change bubble trajectories and bubble-mediated gas flux by altering ocean surface boundary layer turbulence and by generating bubbles within downwelling currents, using a large eddy simulation coupled to a Lagrangian bubble model.
- Test whether submesoscale currents, ocean features a few kilometers across, alter bubble trajectories and bubble-driven gas flux through their interaction with surface boundary layer turbulence.
- Develop improved parameterizations of bubble-mediated air-sea gas flux for use in ocean and climate models, based on first-principles simulations coupling turbulence, individual bubbles, and dissolved gas concentrations.
- Synthesize Labrador Sea field measurements of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen uptake and helium-3 and sulfur hexafluoride evasion with coupled turbulence-bubble-gas simulations to produce a revised gas flux parameterization valid in strongly convective high-latitude oceans.
- Quantify how a gas's solubility governs how much of it is transferred by bubbles, combining the BELS observations with numerical modeling.
- Build education materials on ocean modeling, including a two-day mini-workshop for K-12 teachers and an interactive webpage used in a summer camp and a general education course for non-STEM students.
More about the research
Getting this transfer right matters for estimating how much carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs, for interpreting dissolved gas measurements used to track biological activity, and for predicting where buoyant pollutants travel. Both projects attack the same gap: building physically based descriptions of bubbles in the turbulent layer near the ocean surface and of the gas exchange they drive, one through simulation and one by combining simulation with a field campaign.
Why it matters
Estimates of how much carbon dioxide and oxygen the ocean takes up depend on formulas for air-sea gas exchange that are known to fail where waves and cooling are strongest. Better physically grounded formulas would reduce uncertainty in ocean carbon and oxygen budgets and in climate projections, sharpen the use of dissolved gases as tracers of biological processes, and could also improve prediction of where spilled oil and marine plastics travel, informing decisions on climate, fisheries, energy, and pollution response.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: Investigating Bubble-Mediated Gas Exchange in a Strongly Convective Ocean during the Bubble Exchange in the Labrador Sea (BELS) Experiment
NSF · Dec 2025 – Sep 2027
CAREER: Mechanistic Modeling of Turbulent Bubbly Flows in the Ocean Surface Boundary Layer
NSF · Mar 2026 – Jun 2027
Closest labs
Amrapalli Garanaik
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop a new second-moment model of the upper ocean boundary layer that represents both local and nonlocal turbulent transport, tuned to observations and Large-Eddy Simulation results.
Baylor Fox-Kemper
Brown University, RI·Earth & Environmental Science
Quantify how adding entrainment fluxes to a widely used parameterization of submesoscale mixed-layer instability changes Reynolds-averaged simulations of the Southern Ocean that include ocean biogeochemistry.
Tomas Chor
University of Maryland, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Examine how symmetric instabilities, an overturning motion that grows at ocean fronts, modify the forward cascade of energy toward smaller scales at submesoscale fronts in the presence of mesoscale strain.
The school
Florida State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $461M a year on research, 481 research doctorates a year.
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