The influence of spectral bandwidth and shape on deep-water wave breaking onset

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to explore how spectral bandwidth and shape influence deep-water wave breaking onset, revealing complex relationships and proposing a simple slope-based threshold as an alternative criterion.

Contribution

It clarifies the conflicting effects of spectral bandwidth on wave steepness at breaking onset and introduces a slope-based threshold for predicting wave breaking.

Findings

Locally defined steepness decreases with bandwidth at breaking onset.

Globally defined steepness increases with spectral bandwidth.

A slope threshold of approximately 0.5774 is identified as a universal indicator.

Abstract

Deep-water surface wave breaking affects the transfer of mass, momentum, energy and heat between the air and sea. Understanding when and how the onset of wave breaking will occur remains a challenge. The mechanisms that form steep waves, i.e. nonlinearity or dispersion, are thought to have a strong influence on the onset of wave breaking. In two-dimensions and on deep-water, spectral bandwidth is the main factor that affects the roles these mechanism play. Existing studies, in which the relationship between spectral bandwidth and wave breaking onset is investigated, present varied and sometimes conflicting results. We perform numerical simulations of two-dimensional focused wave groups on deep-water to better understand this relationship, with the aim reconciling existing studies. We show that the way in which steepness is defined, may be the main source confusion in the literature. At breaking onset, locally defined steepness reduces as a function of bandwidth, and globally defined steepness increases. The relationship between global breaking onset steepness and spectral shape (using the parameters bandwidth and spectral skewness) is too complex to parameterise in a general sense. However, we find that the local surface slope of maximally steep non breaking waves, of all spectral bandwidths and shapes (constant-steepness, constant-amplitude, and JONSWAP), approaches a limit of $1/\tan(\pi/3)\approx0.5774$. This slope based threshold, is simple to measure and may be used as an alternative to existing kinematic breaking onset thresholds. There is a potential link between slope based and kinematic breaking onset thresholds which future work should seek to better understand.