Wave Dissipation and Balance - NOPP Wave Project

Abstract

Award Number: N00014-10-1-0383 http://wwz.ifremer.fr/iowaga LONG-TERM GOALSWind-generated waves play a prominent role at the interfaces of the ocean with the atmosphere, land and solid Earth. Waves also define in many ways the appearance of the ocean seen by remote-sensing instruments. Beyond these geophysical aspects, waves also affect human activities at sea and on the coast. The long-term goals of this research are to obtain a better understanding of the physical processes that affect ocean surface waves and their interactions with ocean currents and turbulence, the atmosphere, seismic waves, sediments and remote sensing systems, and to improve our forecasting and hindcasting capacity of these phenomena from the global ocean to the nearshore scale. OBJECTIVES• Observe and parameterize the dissipation of ocean waves due to breaking or wind-wave interactions• Advance spectral wave modeling at all (global to beach) scales in a unified framework, in terms of parameterization and numerical developments• Help the application of wave models to new problems (upper ocean mixing and surface drift, use of seismic noise data, air-sea gas exchange ...) and use these applications for feedback on the wave model quality APPROACH AND WORK PLANBy combining theoretical advances with numerical models, remote sensing and field observations, we investigate the physical processes that affect wind-generated ocean gravity waves, and provide constraints on their parameterization in spectral models. The various dissipative processes that contribute to the spectral wave evolution are isolated by considering geophysical situations in which they are dominant: the long-distance swell propagation in the case of air-sea friction, the evolution of swells on shallow continent shelves in the case of bottom friction, the energy level in the spectral tail in the case of cumulative breaking effects, and the breaking statistics of waves. These require the 1

The influence of waves on the tidal kinetic energy resource at a tidal stream energy site

“…TOMAWAC is driven by JONSWAP wave spectra established on the basis of integrated parameters of significant wave height, peak period, direction and spreading. These parameters are predicted along open boundaries of the TOMAWAC computational domain by a regional run of WaveWatch III (WWIII) over the northeastern Atlantic ocean, at three hourly intervals with a spatial resolution of 18 km, in the context of the IOWAGA project (Integrated Ocean WAves for Geophysical and other Applications, Ifremer, France) [60].…”