Field Observations of Breaking of Dominant Surface Waves.

Pivaev, Pavel D.; Kudryavtsev, Vladimir N.; Korinenko, Aleksandr E.; Malinovsky, Vladimir V.

The results of field observations of breaking of surface spectral peak waves, taken from an oceanographic research platform, are presented. Whitecaps generated by breaking surface waves were detected using video recordings of the sea surface, accompanied by co-located measurements of waves and wind velocity. Whitecaps were separated according to the speed of their movement, c, and then described in terms of spectral distributions of their areas and lengths over c. The contribution of dominant waves to the whitecap coverage varies with the wave age and attains more than 50% when seas are young. As found, the whitecap coverage and the total length of whitecaps generated by dominant waves exhibit strong dependence on the dominant wave steepness, ϵ p , the former being proportional to ϵ p 6 . This result supports a parameterization of the dissipation term, used in the WAM model. A semi-empirical model of the whitecap coverage, where contributions of breaking of dominant and equilibrium range waves are separated, is suggested.

WIND speed; VIDEO recording; WIND measurement; POLARITONS; PARAMETERIZATION

Remote Sensing, 2021, Vol 13, Issue 16, p3321

2072-4292

Academic Journal

10.3390/rs13163321