Analysis of swell near the island of Aruba

Abstract

Intermittently during the winter, swell and associated breakers appear along a beach on the lee side of Aruba, an island lying off the coast of Venezuela in the Trade Winds. It has been hypothesized that 14‐ to 15‐sec waves, generated by winter storms off the mid‐Atlantic coast of North America, propagate southward to Mona Passage, where they are refracted. They then propagate across the Caribbean Sea toward Aruba, where they are refracted off the northwest tip of the island and arrive at the beach on the leeward coast. Measurements of swell off this beach were conducted during March 1969. Spectra and directions of travel were computed from these measurements, and probable swell generation areas were located. Reasonable agreement is found between swell periods and directions computed from field measurements and those deduced from wave ray patterns. All evidence obtained is consistent with the hypothesis of a North Atlantic generation area.

Observations of nonlinear effects in directional spectra of shoaling gravity waves

“…On most beaches, waves become more directionally collimated and amplitudes increase as the depth decreases. The linear refraction theory for wave fields that are broad in both frequency and direction has been developed extensively and applied to a variety of coastal surface wave studies, ranging from qualitative works [e.g., Horn-rna et al, 1966;Wilson et al, 1973;Pawka, 1983] to numerical modeling of the full linear transformation of the frequency-directional spectrum by topography [e.g., Pawka et al, 1984]. Linear theory has been reasonably successful in predicting directional characteristics of refracted waves in relatively shallow water, given estimates of deep water directional spectra and knowledge of the bathymetry.…”

The dynamics of the littoral zone

“…Efforts have been made to extend such wave transformation studies to continuous ocean wave spectra [Karlsson, 1969;Collins, 1972]. Computer techniques have seen practical application in the prediction of shallow water wave climates and the identification of source areas for these waves [Keulegan and Harrison, 1970;Jen, 1969;Wilson et al, 1973;Mogel et al, 1970]. We will have more to say about this later.…”

Caribbean Beach-Face Slopes and Beach Equilibrium Profiles

“…Beaches on the islands bordering the Caribbean Sea differ in at least two respects from beaches in temperate zones: (1) they consist mainly of skeletal calcium carbonate sands of marine origin rather than quartz and feldspar-rich detrital sands, (2) much of the time they experience fairweather waves of relatively low energy and steepness produced either locally by trade winds or received as swell from distant storms (Wilson, 1969;Wilson et al , 1973;Terwindt et al, 1984). Mean tidal range is also minimal (less than 20 cm) within the eastern Caribbean basin (Kjervfe, 1981) around which most of the Caribbean islands are located.…”