Effect of a weak current on wind-generated waves in the wrinkle regime

TL;DR

This study numerically examines how weak currents influence wind-induced surface wrinkles in the gravity regime, revealing significant geometric modifications but minimal impact on size and amplitude, with implications for wave onset.

Contribution

It introduces a modified spectral theory accounting for weak sheared currents and a spectral interpolation method to efficiently evaluate surface deformations.

Findings

Wrinkles tilt under transverse currents.

Finer scales observed with longitudinal currents.

Wrinkle size and amplitude are largely unaffected.

Abstract

We investigate numerically the influence of a weak current on wind-generated surface deformations for wind velocity below the onset of regular waves. In that regime, the liquid surface is populated by small disorganised deformations elongated in the wind direction, referred to as wrinkles. These wrinkles are the superposition of incoherent wakes generated by the pressure fluctuations traveling in the turbulent boundary layer in the air. In this work, we account for the effect of a weak sheared current in the liquid, either longitudinal or transverse, by introducing a modified Doppler-shifted dispersion relation to lowest order in viscosity and current in the spectral theory previously derived by Perrard et al (2019). This theory describes the simplified one-way problem of surface deformations excited by a prescribed turbulent forcing, thereby neglecting the retroaction of waves on turbulence in the air. The forcing is taken from a set of direct numerical simulations of a turbulent channel flow. We determine the wrinkle properties (size and amplitude) as a function of the liquid viscosity and current properties (surface velocity, thickness and orientation). We find significant modifications of the wrinkle geometry by the currents: the wrinkles are tilted for a transverse current, and show finer scales for a longitudinal current. However, their characteristic size is weakly affected, and their amplitude remains independent of the current. We discuss the implications of these results on the onset of regular waves at larger wind velocity. In this work, we introduce a spectral interpolation method to evaluate the surface deformation fields, based on a refined meshing close to the dispersion relation of the waves. This method, which can be extended to any dispersive system excited by a random forcing, strongly reduces the discretization effects at a low computational cost.