Enhanced ocean wave modeling by including effect of breaking under both deep- and shallow-water conditions

Abstract

Accurate description of the wind energy input into ocean waves is crucial to ocean wave modeling and a physics-based consideration on the effect of wave breaking is absolutely necessary to obtain such an accurate description. This study evaluates the performance of an improved formula recently proposed by Xu and Yu (2020), who took into account not only the effect of breaking but also the effect of airflow separation on the leeside of steep wave crests in a reasonably consistent way. Numerical results are obtained through coupling an enhanced atmospheric wave boundary layer model with the ocean wave model WAVEWATCH III (v5.16). The coupled model has been extended to be valid in both deep and shallow waters. Duration-limited waves under controlled normal conditions and storm waves under practical hurricane conditions are studied in detail to verify the improved model. Both the representative wave parameters and the parameters characterizing the wave spectrum are discussed. It is shown that the improved source-term package for the wind energy input and the wave energy dissipation leads to more accurate results under all conditions. It performs evidently better than other standard source-term options of ST2, ST4 and ST6 embedded in WAVEWATCH III. It is also demonstrated that the improvement is particularly important for waves at their early development stage and waves in shallow waters.