Modeling Wind Wave Evolution from Deep to Shallow Water

Ocean waves are an important aspect of upper ocean dynamics, in particular on the shallow continental shelves and in coastal areas. The long-term objective of this work is to advance wave modeling capability in such coastal areas by improving model representations of effects associated with nonlinearity, inhomogeneity, and dissipation. The specific objectives of the present work are 1) to develop and implement an efficient and scalable approximation for the nonlinear quadruplet source term, 2) to develop and implement a generalized nonlinear source term that is accurate in water of arbitrary depth, 3) to develop an improved nonlinear closure for triad nonlinear interactions in shallow water, and 4) improve representations of dissipation by wave breaking and wave-bottom interactions in shoaling waves.
Prepared in cooperation with Theiss Research, El Granada, CA and the Department of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.