Turbulence and mixing in unsteady breaking surface waves

Drazen, David; Melville, W. Kendall

doi:10.1017/s0022112009006120

Cited by 52 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Finally, Drazen & Melville (2009) used a similar DPIV technique to analyse properties of the flow induced by a plunging breaking wave. Drazen (personal communication) has provided us with archived data of 20 repeats of the velocity field induced by breaking from the study of Drazen & Melville (2009, figure 2).…”

Section: Comparison With Laboratory Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Drazen (personal communication) has provided us with archived data of 20 repeats of the velocity field induced by breaking from the study of Drazen & Melville (2009, figure 2). Following the analysis of MVW, for each realization we compute the circulation around a closed rectangular contour that encompasses the vortex under consideration.…”

Section: Comparison With Laboratory Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We thank the anonymous referees for comments that have lead to significant improvements to the paper; D. Drazen for providing readily accessible archived data from Drazen & Melville (2009); B. Reineman for his assistance in generating some of the figures, and L. Romero for providing the template for figure 1.…”

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To this end, equating (3.10), (3.13) or (3.17) with (3.7), we have Here S is as defined in (1.2) while f c represents the centre frequency of the input wave packet. RM, DM and Rapp correspond to Rapp & Melville (1990), Drazen & Melville (2009) and Rapp (1986), respectively, and all other names are as denoted in the text. Note that the available data includes both plunging and spilling breaking waves.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Vortex generation by deep-water breaking waves

Pizzo

Melville

2013

J. Fluid Mech.

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The connection between wave dissipation by breaking deep-water surface gravity waves and the resulting turbulence and mixing is crucial for an improved understanding of air-sea interaction processes. Starting with the ensemble-averaged Euler equations, governing the evolution of the mean flow, we model the forcing, associated with the breaking-induced Reynolds shear stresses, as a body force describing the bulk scale effects of a breaking deep-water surface gravity wave on the water column. From this, we derive an equation describing the generation of circulation, Γ , of the ensemble-average velocity field, due to the body force. By examining the relationship between a breaking wave and an impulsively forced fluid, we propose a functional form for the body force, allowing us to build upon the classical work on vortex ring phenomena to both quantify the circulation generated by a breaking wave and describe the vortex structure of the induced motion. Using scaling arguments, we show that Γ = α(hk) 3/2 c 3 /g, where (c, h, k) represent a characteristic speed, height and wavenumber of the breaking wave, respectively, g is the acceleration due to gravity and α is a constant. This then allows us to find a direct relationship between the circulation and the wave energy dissipation rate per unit crest length due to breaking, l . Finally, we compare our model and the available experimental data.

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Section: Comparison With Laboratory Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Comparison With Laboratory Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Vortex generation by deep-water breaking waves

Pizzo

Melville

2013

J. Fluid Mech.

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“…In the 1 3 161 Page 2 of 20 and Fairall 1998;Janssen 1999;Sullivan and McWilliams 2002;Sullivan et al 2008;Yang and Shen 2010;Suzuki et al 2013;Grare et al 2013a;Hara and Sullivan 2015). Airflow separation for example, is the kinematic air-side equivalent to wave breaking in the water (Banner and Melville 1976;Gent and Taylor 1977), a process which is known to generate turbulence and enhance dissipation (Rapp and Melville 1990;Melville et al 2002;Drazen and Melville 2009). Thus, airflow separation is similarly expected to dramatically affect the structure of the wind stress (drag) upon the ocean surface (Banner and Melville 1976;Buckley and Veron 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Airflow measurements at a wavy air–water interface using PIV and LIF

Buckley

Véron

2017

Exp Fluids

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geophysical sphere, which largely motivates this study, fluxes of momentum and scalars across the wavy air-sea interface provide boundary conditions for both the atmosphere and the oceans and are therefore, pivotal in controlling the evolution of weather and climate. These fluxes are affected by fine-scale, coupled dynamics above and below the wavy ocean surface. In fact, the surface waves significantly modify the boundary layers on both sides of the interface and it is now well established that it is through waverelated dynamical processes that the air and water boundary layers are coupled (see Sullivan and McWilliams (2010) for a review on the topic).On the water side, for example, it has been shown that the interaction between the wave-induced Lagrangian mass transport, i.e. the Stokes drift, and the surface shear current, leads to the generation of Langmuir circulations, causing significant mixing of the water column (Skyllingstad and Denbo 1995;McWilliams et al. 1997;Noh et al. 2005;Li et al. 2005;Harcourt and D'Asaro 2008; Grant and E 2009;Veron et al. 2009;Kukulka et al. 2010;Belcher et al. 2012;D'Asaro 2014). When surface waves break, the turbulence injected into the water column also significantly enhances surface mixing Melville et al. 1998;Veron and Melville 1999;Melville et al. 2002;Thorpe et al. 2003;Gemmrich and Farmer 2004) and leads to substantial deviations from the classical theories (Agrawal et al. 1992;Thorpe 1993;Melville 1994;Anis and Moum 1995;Melville 1996;Terray et al. 1996; Veron and Melville 2001) and causes significant energy dissipation (Banner et al. 2014;Thomson et al. 2016;Schwendeman et al. 2014;Zappa et al. 2016; Melville 2013, 2015).On the air side, it is clear that surface wave processes also play an important role in the kinematics and dynamics of the boundary layer (e.g. Janssen 1989; Komen et al. 1994;Belcher and Hunt 1998;Hristov et al. 1998; Abstract Physical phenomena at an air-water interface are of interest in a variety of flows with both industrial and natural/environmental applications. In this paper, we present novel experimental techniques incorporating a multi-camera multi-laser instrumentation in a combined particle image velocimetry and laser-induced fluorescence system. The system yields accurate surface detection thus enabling velocity measurements to be performed very close to the interface. In the application presented here, we show results from a laboratory study of the turbulent airflow over wind driven surface waves. Accurate detection of the wavy air-water interface further yields a curvilinear coordinate system that grants practical and easy implementation of ensemble and phase averaging routines. In turn, these averaging techniques allow for the separation of mean, surface wave coherent, and turbulent velocity fields. In this paper, we describe the instrumentation and techniques and show several data products obtained on the air-side of a wavy air-water interface.

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Experimental study on plunging breaking waves in deep water

et al. 2015

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This study presents a unique data set that combines measurements of velocities and void fraction under an unsteady deep water plunging breaker in a laboratory. Flow properties in the aerated crest region of the breaking wave were measured using modified particle image velocimetry (PIV) and bubble image velocimetry (BIV). Results show that the maximum velocity in the plunging breaker reached 1.68C at the first impingement of the overturning water jet with C being the phase speed of the primary breaking wave, while the maximum velocity reached 2.14C at the beginning of the first splash-up. A similarity profile of void fraction was found in the successive impinging and splash-up rollers. In the highly foamy splashing roller, the increase of turbulent level and vorticity level were strongly correlated with the increase of void fraction when the range of void fraction was between 0 and 0.4 (from the trough level to approximately the center of the roller). The levels became constant when void fraction was greater than 0.5. The mass flux, momentum flux, kinetic energy, potential energy, and total energy were computed and compared with and without the void fraction being accounted for. The results show that all the mean and turbulence properties related to the air-water mixture are considerably overestimated unless void fraction is considered. When including the density variation due to the air bubbles, the wave energy dissipated exponentially a short distance after breaking; about 54% and 85% of the total energy dissipated within one and two wavelengths beyond the breaking wave impingement point, respectively.

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Turbulence and mixing in unsteady breaking surface waves

Cited by 52 publications

References 37 publications

Vortex generation by deep-water breaking waves

Vortex generation by deep-water breaking waves

Airflow measurements at a wavy air–water interface using PIV and LIF

Experimental study on plunging breaking waves in deep water

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