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Breaking probabilities for dominant surface waves on water of finite constant depth

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posted on 2024-07-13, 00:47 authored by Alexander Babanin, Ian R. Young, Michael L. Banner
This paper extends our previous study of the breaking probability of dominant deep water gravity surface waves into the finite water depth environment. It Research reports a unified behavior of the mean breaking statistics once the effects of finite water depth are taken into account. The shallow water wave data that form the basis of this study were acquired at a field experiment site at Lake George, New South Wales, Australia. The breaking events were detected through visual observation of videotaped records of the wave field in combination with acoustic signatures of the breaking waves from a collocated hydrophone. Following Banner et al. [2000], we argue that when constant finite depth bottom influence is operative, nonlinear hydrodynamical effects associated with energy and momentum fluxes within deforming wave groups remain the primary determinant of breaking onset. This underpins our proposed finite depth water parameterization for the environmental dependence of dominant wave breaking probability, given by the average number of breakers passing a fixed point per dominant wave period. The additional influence of bottom interaction with the wind drift current shear and wind forcing are also included in our finite constant depth formulation. This is a natural extension of our recently proposed deep water dependence and reduces to it as the significant wave height becomes much smaller than the water depth. In common with the deep water case we propose that there exists a threshold of the significant peak steepness below which negligible dominant wave breaking occurs. The available data show encouraging agreement with our proposed dependence, with a correlation coefficient approaching 0.9.

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ISSN

0148-0227

Journal title

Journal of geophysical research

Volume

106

Issue

C6

Pagination

17 pp

Publisher

American Geophysical Union

Copyright statement

Copyright © 2001 American Geophysical Union. The published version is reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.

Language

eng

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