Do surface gravity waves have a frozen turbulence state?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether surface gravity waves in a finite domain can sustain ongoing energy cascades or settle into a frozen turbulence state, revealing a sharp transition influenced by initial conditions and resonance structures.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel kinematic model for analyzing energy transfer via exact resonances in finite discrete wavenumber space, highlighting conditions for turbulence or freezing.

Findings

Energy cascades occur when the initial excited region is large enough.

A sharp transition exists between active cascades and frozen turbulence.

Angular resonances significantly influence the cascade dynamics.

Abstract

We study the energy transfer by exact resonances for surface gravity waves in a finite periodic spatial domain. Based on a kinematic model simulating the generation of active wave modes in a finite discrete wavenumber space $\mathcal{S}_R$, we examine the possibility of direct and inverse energy cascades. More specifically, we set an initially excited region which iteratively spreads energy to wave modes in $\mathcal{S}_R$ through exact resonances. At each iteration, we first activate new modes from scale resonances (which generate modes with new lengths), then consider two bounding situations for angle resonances (which transfer energy at the same length scale): the lower bound where no angle resonance is included and the upper bound where all modes with the same length as any active mode are excited. Such a strategy is essential to enable the computation for a large domain $\mathcal{S}_R$ with the maximum wavenumber $R\sim 10^3$. We show that for both direct and inverse cascades, the energy cascade to the boundaries of $\mathcal{S}_R$ can be established when the initially excited region is sufficiently large, otherwise a frozen turbulence state occurs, with a sharp transition between the two regimes especially for the direct cascade. Through a study on the structure of resonant quartets, the mechanism associated with the sharp transition and the role of angular energy transfer in the cascades are elucidated.