Recent progress on understanding and modelling ocean wave breaking
This presentation highlights recent scientific progress towards a deeper understanding of wave breaking. For this familiar sea surface process, a basic understanding of the mechanisms determining the onset and strength of breaking events has remained elusive. Recent numerical studies of the role of nonlinear wave group dynamics in breaking onset of unidirectional wave groups found that breaking onset was a threshold process, where the threshold re ected the convergence rate of wave energy owing to the tallest wave from the other waves in the group. It was proposed that this convergence rate should also underpin the strength of breaking events. Novel laboratory measurements are described that seek to validate this new perspective on breaking onset and strength. The measurements confirmed the model predictions for breaking onset and validated the convergence rate parameter as a reliable measure of breaking strength. An application of these findings is brie y described in which a spectral dissipation rate source term based on this perspective is used in a wind wave forecasting model. The dissipation rates can be used to quantify the spectral density of mean whitecap length per unit area. For the dominant waves, our forecasts compare favourably with remotely-sensed whitecap properties.
breaking deep water waves breaking wave prediction breaking wave dissipation rate
M.L.Banner W.L.Peirson R.P.Morison
Climate and Environmental Dynamics Laboratory, School of Mathematics, The University of New South Wa School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Aus-tralia Climate and Environmental Dynamics Laboratory, School of Mathematics, The University of New South Wa
国际会议
The Fifth International Conference on Fluid Mechanics(第五届国际流体力学会议)
上海
英文
2007-08-15（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）