Account of occasional wave breaking in numerical simulations of irregular water waves in the focus of the rogue wave problem

TL;DR

This paper discusses how wave breaking is modeled in numerical simulations of irregular ocean waves, emphasizing its importance for accurately predicting rogue waves and comparing different regularization methods within the High Order Spectral Method.

Contribution

It identifies conditions for reproducible non-dissipative simulations and compares wave breaking regularization techniques in the context of rogue wave modeling.

Findings

Wave breaking regularization affects wave evolution within 20 minutes.

Non-dissipative simulations serve as a reference for regularized models.

Wave breaking impacts rogue wave probability and asymmetry.

Abstract

The issue of accounting of the wave breaking phenomenon in direct numerical simulations of oceanic waves is discussed. It is emphasized that this problem is crucial for the deterministic description of waves, and also for the dynamical calculation of extreme wave statistical characteristics, such as rogue wave height probability, asymmetry, etc. The conditions for reproducible simulations of irregular steep waves within the High Order Spectral Method for the potential Euler equations are identified. Such non-dissipative simulations are considered as the reference when comparing with the simulations which use two kinds of wave breaking regularization. It is shown that the perturbations caused by the wave breaking attenuation may be noticeable within 20 min of the wave evolution.