Dissipation observations of drag coefficients over the open ocean

Forty-three open-ocean observations of drag coefficients observed at Argus Island Tower near Bermuda by the dissipation technique resulted in constant drag coefficients for mean horizontal wind velocities between 7.8 and
10.4 m .s^{1}
in good agreement with the larger near-neutral data set of DeLeonibus and Simpson [1] and the neutral data of Large and Pond [2], both of whom observed
10^{3}C_{10} = 1.2
where
C_{10}
is the drag coefficient at l0 m. Ratios of vertical-to-horizontal wind velocity spectral densities averaged over an inertial subrange of 0.8 to 1.6 Hz ranged from 0.7 to 1.07 in agreement with the Busch and Panofsky [3] result that isotropy is approached only when the observation height is much greater than the Nyquist wavelength.