Crest speeds of unsteady surface water waves

TL;DR

This study investigates the cyclic variations in crest speeds of unsteady water waves, revealing a phenomenon where gravity wave crests slow down and speed up due to wave form changes, with implications for understanding natural wave behavior.

Contribution

It provides new insights into crest speed dynamics of unsteady waves, especially the cyclic slowdown and speedup in gravity waves, supported by simulations and observational data.

Findings

Crest speeds cyclically slow down and speed up in gravity waves.

Wave crest behavior is influenced by wave dispersion and nonlinearity.

Observations confirm the theoretical and simulation results.

Abstract

Intuitively, crest speeds of water waves are assumed to match their phase velocities. However, this is generally not the case for natural waves within unsteady wave groups. This motivates our study, which presents new insights into the generic behavior of crest speeds of linear to highly nonlinear unsteady waves. While our major focus is on gravity waves where a generic crest slowdown occurs cyclically, results for capillary-dominated waves are also discussed, for which crests cyclically speed up. This curious phenomenon arises when the theoretical constraint of steadiness is relaxed, allowing waves to change their form, or shape. In particular, a kinematic analysis of both simulated and observed open ocean gravity waves reveals a forward-to-backward leaning cycle for each individual crest within a wave group. This is clearly manifest during the focusing of dominant wave groups essentially due to the dispersive nature of waves. It occurs routinely for focusing linear (vanishingly small steepness) wave groups, and it is enhanced as the wave spectrum broadens. It is found to be relatively insensitive to the degree of phase coherence and focusing of wave groups. The nonlinear nature of waves limits the crest slowdown. This reduces when gravity waves become less dispersive, either as they steepen or as they propagate over finite water depths. This is demonstrated by numerical simulations of the unsteady evolution of 2D and 3D dispersive gravity wave packets in both deep and intermediate water depths, and by open ocean space-time measurements.