High Speed PIV of Breaking Waves on Both Sides of the Air-Water Interface

Wave breaking on the surface of the ocean results in significant transfer of mass, momentum, heat and energy across the air-sea interface. However, understanding the physics of these phenomena remains a challenge, as both the measurement and simulation of the relevant processes are highly complex. Recent numerical studies have begun to investigate the air-water coupling during the breaking process using level set methods (Hendrickson, 2004), but relatively few experimental studies have looked at flow on both sides of this interface. In order to more clearly understand the whole picture and to generate accurate models, experiments and simulations which consider the physics on both the air and water-side of the air-sea interface are necessary. This talk presents experiments on small-scale, steep breaking waves forced by shoaling the waves up a ten degree slope to a level plateau. Breaking waves are generated by a computer controlled, paddle-type wave maker at one end of small (250cm long, 15.25 cm wide, 20.3 cm deep) acrylic tank. A beach is place at the far end of the tank to absorb reflections. The waves generated in this tank were smaller in scale than typical wave breaking experiments, in order to compare with numerical simulations by Hendrickson which were on