Wave height

About: Wave height is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5920 publications have been published within this topic receiving 100257 citations.

Breaker Travel and Choice of Design Wave Height

Abstract: Experiments on three-plane laboratory beaches show that plunging waves travel a horizontal distance of from four to eight times breaker height during the breaking process. This suggests that the potentially damaging effect of breaking waves may be spread over a significant horizontal distance. The experiments, as well as previously available data, show that breaker depth-to-height ratios for plunging waves decrease from above 1.3 to below 0.9 as beach slope increases, so that higher waves on steeper slopes may approach nearer to shore before breaking. The combined effect of breaker travel and breaker depth-to-height ratio is such that structures sited in shallow water on moderate or steep slopes can be subject to breaking wave heights significantly larger than the design heights computed according to accepted practice. The experimental results are consistent with a solitary wave description of oscillatory waves at breaking, if the breaker depths of oscillatory waves are appropriately defined, and they are consistent with the limiting heights of breaking waves measured on rubble-mound breakwaters.

Wave measurement and modeling in Chesapeake Bay

Abstract: Three recently measured wind and wave data sets in the northern part of Chesapeake Bay (CB) are presented. Two of the three data sets were collected in late 1995. The third one was collected in July of 1998. The analyzed wind and wave data show that waves were dominated by locally generated, fetch limited young wind seas. Significant wave heights were highly correlated to the local driving wind speeds and the response time of the waves to the winds was about 1 h. We also tested two very different numerical wave models, Simulation of WAves Nearshore (SWAN) and Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), to hind-cast the wave conditions against the data sets. Time series model–data comparisons made using SWAN and GLERL showed that both models behaved well in response to a suddenly changing wind. In general, both SWAN and GLERL over-predicted significant wave height; SWAN over-predicted more than GLERL did. SWAN had a larger scatter index and a smaller correlation coefficient for wave height than GLERL had. In addition, both models slightly under-predicted the peak period with a fairly large scatter and low correlation coefficient. SWAN predicted mean wave direction better than GLERL did. Directional wave spectral comparisons between SWAN predictions and the data support these statistical comparisons. The GLERL model was much more computationally efficient for wind wave forecasts in CB. SWAN and GLERL predicted different wave height field distributions for the same winds in deeper water areas of the Bay where data were not available, however. These differences are as yet unresolved.

Revisiting Wilson’s Formulas for Simplified Wind-Wave Prediction

Abstract: A procedure for predicting the significant height and period of wind waves generated in a uniform fetch in deep water is presented in the closed-form expressions based on Wilson’s formulas, together with relevant design diagrams. Although Wilson’s formulas are relatively unknown in the United States, they are quite reliable. The relationship between the nondimensional minimum duration and the nondimensional fetch length is empirically expressed in a power law, which enables the analyst to judge whether the wave growth is limited by the wind duration or the fetch length. The correlation between the significant wave height and period also indicates the period approximately proportional to the 2/3 power of the wave height.