Overview of recent developments on wave breaking in deep and intermediate depth water
Michael L. Banner, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, New York
Main content
There has been long-term strong scientific interest in surface water waves and their breaking. This overview will highlight certain recently announced exciting developments on key aspects of this historically elusive topic, which likely have broader application to other natural dispersive wave systems. Of particular relevance to water wave breaking are refinements to our understanding of wave geometry/kinematics in unsteady 2D and 3D wave packet evolution, involving generic crest (and trough) leaning modes which can appreciably modify wave crest (and trough) speeds. This has led to new insights on wave breaking onset that offer support for a unified breaking threshold for 2D and 3D wave packets propagating over uniform bathymetry for a wide range of depth/wavelength conditions. Recent developments on the allied topics of energy dissipation rates from breaking and the representation of wave breaking in spectral ocean wave forecast models will also be discussed.
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