On the Existence of Water Turbulence Induced by Nonbreaking Surface Waves

By A. Babanin, Brian Haus. 2009

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper is dedicated to wave-induced turbulence unrelated to wave breaking. The existence of such turbulence has been foreshadowed in a number of experimental, theoretical, and numerical studies. The current study presents direct measurements of this turbulence. The laboratory experiment was conducted by means of particle image velocimetry, which allowed estimates of wavenumber velocity spectra beneath monochromatic nonbreaking unforced waves. Observed spectra intermittently exhibited the Kolmogorov interval associated with the presence of isotropic turbulence. The magnitudes of the energy dissipation rates due to this turbulence in the particular case of 1.5-Hz deep-water waves were quantified as a function of the surface wave amplitude. The presence of such turbulence, previously not accounted for, can affect the physics of the wave energy dissipation, the subsurface boundary layer, and the ocean mixing in a significant way.

Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f8f8d156f5436d8bdaf92cba1cd5eaa7872953a

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In Earth-Surface Processes

In Oceanography

Citations in the corpus

Challenges and Prospects in Ocean Circulation Models (2019, background): “However, this attitude is changing with the growing awareness of the importance of wave breaking effects and wave-driven mixing (Melville, 1996; Babanin and Haus, 2009; Huang and Qiao, 2010), such as Langmuir turbulence (Belcher et al.”
Surface Wave Effects in the NEMO Ocean Model: Forced and Coupled Experiments (2015, background): “term coupled climate integrations. This latter mixing process appears similar to the mixing due to the high Reynolds numbers of the orbital motion of non-breaking waves explored by Babanin (2006) and Babanin and Haus (2009). Using a climate model of intermediate complexity, Babanin et al. (2009) exp”