Observation of swell dissipation across oceans

By Fabrice Ardhuin, Bertrand Chapron, Fabrice Collard. 2008

363 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Global observations of ocean swell, from satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar data, are used to estimate the dissipation of swell energy for a number of storms. Swells can be very persistent with energy e‐folding scales exceeding 20,000 km. For increasing swell steepness this scale shrinks systematically, down to 2800 km for the steepest observed swells, revealing a significant loss of swell energy. This value corresponds to a normalized energy decay in time β = 4.2 × 10−6 s −1. Many processes may be responsible for this dissipation. The increase of dissipation rate in dissipation with swell steepness is interpreted as a laminar to turbulent transition of the boundary layer, with a threshold Reynolds number of the order of 100,000. These observations of swell evolution open the way for more accurate wave forecasting models, and provide a constraint on swell‐induced air‐sea fluxes of momentum and energy.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ceef81f843e00ce8afe92b0a7a815a28067da63e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

1. W. E. Rogers
2. David W. Wang
3. Fabrice Ardhuin
4. A. Babanin
5. Fabrice Collard
6. Bertrand Chapron
7. C. Jongedijk
8. B. Fox‐Kemper

In Oceanography

1. Fabrice Ardhuin
2. A. Babanin
3. Fabrice Collard
4. W. E. Rogers
5. David W. Wang
6. Bertrand Chapron
7. M. Thiel
8. B. Fox‐Kemper

Citations in the corpus

• Problems in RMSE-based wave model validations (2013, background): “1 The acronym ACC350 refers to the authors Ardhuin, Collart and Chapron, who developed a term describing the long swell decay, based on a study of Synthetic Aperture Radar observations (Ardhuin et al., 2008, 2009).”
• Monitoring and analysis of ocean swell fields from space: New methods for routine observations (2009, methodology): “[54] A systematic analysis and interpretation of this dissipation is given by Ardhuin et al. [2009a] .”
• The physical oceanography of the transport of floating marine debris (2020, background): “From an observational perspective, Stokes drift can be inferred from high-frequency radar (Ardhuin et al 2009b) and has the potential to be estimated from satellite measurements (Ardhuin et al 2019).”
• Observation-Consistent Input and Whitecapping Dissipation in a Model for Wind-Generated Surface Waves: Description and Simple Calculations (2012, methodology): “(2000), Babanin et al. (2001), YB06, and DBYB—was done by Ardhuin et al.”