2019/11/15 by Morteza Derakhti, James T. Kirby, Derakhti, Morteza +7 · 2 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Ocean Waves and Remote Sensing #Coastal and Marine Dynamics #Tropical and Extratropical Cyclones Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1911.06896
We investigate the validity and robustness of the Barthelemy et al. (2018)\nbreaking wave onset prediction framework for surface gravity water waves in\narbitrary water depth, including shallow water breaking over varying\nbathymetry. We show that the Barthelemy et al. (2018) breaking onset criterion,\nwhich they validated for deep and intermediate water depths, also segregates\nbreaking crests from non-breaking crests in shallow water, with subsequent\nbreaking always following the exceedance of their proposed generic breaking\nthreshold. We consider a number of representative wave types, including\nregular, irregular, solitary, and focused waves, shoaling over idealized bed\ntopographies including an idealized bar geometry and a mildly- to\nsteeply-sloping planar beach. Our results show that the new breaking onset\ncriterion is capable of detecting single and multiple breaking events in time\nand space in arbitrary water depth. Further, we show that the new generic\ncriterion provides improved skill for signaling imminent breaking onset,\nrelative to the available kinematic or geometric breaking onset criteria in the\nliterature. In particular, the new criterion is suitable for use in\nwave-resolving models that cannot intrinsically detect the onset of wave\nbreaking.\n