Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2402.14106

The energetic inception of breaking in surface gravity waves under wind forcing

Daniel G. Boettger·Shane R. Keating·Michael L. Banner·Russel P. Morison·Xavier Barthélémy
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The breaking of surface gravity waves is a key process contributing to air-sea fluxes and turbulent ocean mixing. The highly nonlinear nature of wave breaking, combined with the challenges of observing this process in a laboratory or field setting, leaves our understanding of the energetic processes underpinning wave breaking incomplete. Progress towards refining this understanding was made in a recent study (D. G. Boettger et. al., An energetic signature for breaking inception in surface gravity waves, Journal of Fluid Mechanics 959, A33 (2023)), which identified an energetic signature in the wave kinetic energy evolution that preceded breaking onset and correlated with the strength of the breaking event. In this study, we examine the influence of wind forcing on this energetic signature. We develop a numerical wave tank that simulates wind flowing over mechanically generated waves and construct an ensemble of cases with varying wave steepness and wind forcing speed. The wind is shown to modulate the wave geometry and elevate kinetic energy at crest tip by up to 35 %. Despite these influences, the energetic inception signature was found to robustly indicate breaking inception in all cases examined, with a threshold value in the kinetic energy growth rate at this instant separating breaking and non-breaking waves. Under wind forcing, the timing of the energetic inception point occurred slightly earlier that unforced breaking waves, giving advance warning of breaking 0.3 wave periods prior to breaking onset.

Explore related subjects

physics.flu-dyn

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Daniel G. Boettger, Shane R. Keating, Michael L. Banner, Russel P. Morison, Xavier Barthélémy. 2024-04-17. The energetic inception of breaking in surface gravity waves under wind forcing. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevfluids.9.054803

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Kinetic closure of turbulence

This letter presents a kinetic closure of the filtered Boltzmann--BGK equation, paving the way toward an alternative description of turbulence. The closure retains the turbulent subfilter stress tensor without a separate Smagorinsky-type ansatz for its structure, unlike classical filtered Navier--Stokes closures. In contrast, it accounts for the subfilter turbulent diffusion in the nonconserved moments by generalizing the BGK collision operator. The model does not require scale separation between resolved and unresolved scales. The Chapman--Enskog analysis shows how its hydrodynamic limit can converge to the filtered Navier--Stokes equations, with velocity gradients isolating subfilter contributions. Numerical tests on the Taylor--Green vortex and the turbulent mixing layer show improved stability and reduced dissipation in the reported cases, benchmarked against the Smagorinsky model.

physics.flu-dyn↗
arXiv2026

Kinetic closure of turbulence: collision-side modeling beyond the filtered Boltzmann equation

This article extends a recently introduced kinetic closure of turbulence by developing its theoretical framework, operational realizations, and validation. In contrast with filtered Navier--Stokes formulations, filtering the Boltzmann equation retains subgrid transport under the linear streaming operator, so that unresolved physics is concentrated on the collision side. We show that in dilute-gas large-eddy simulation, the main limitation of Bhatnagar--Gross--Krook (BGK)-type collision models is not the breakdown of molecular chaos, but the retention of a Markovian collision at a scale where filtering can induce finite temporal correlations in the collision product. In a BGK-type framework, the closure problem is dual: one must infer the filtered fine-grained equilibrium, not computable from filtered moments alone, and model the non-Markovian collision dynamics generated by the collision-product covariance. The present framework makes this dual structure explicit and represents the resulting collision-covariance source term through a BGK-like closure built from the equilibrium commutation residual, with the turbulent relaxation frequency given by a first phenomenological realization. The framework relies on a Chapman--Enskog analysis organized by the reference timescale ratio emerging from the nondimensionalization of the kinetic equation, performed in the classical sense, thereby avoiding artificial turbulent scale separations. We show that the Chapman--Enskog structure is not a pure one-parameter Knudsen scaling: the primary ordering is set by the kinetic-to-macroscopic timescale ratio, while higher moments retain an additional Mach dependence through the mixed scaling of particle velocity. The resulting kinetic closures are validated through lattice Boltzmann simulations and compared with the Smagorinsky model and regularization-based collision models.

physics.flu-dyn↗
arXiv2026

Deep Koopman Sensing

Real-time reconstruction of fluid flows from sparse sensor measurements is important for both physical understanding and flow control. When first-principles models are too expensive for online data assimilation (DA), learned reduced-order models provide an efficient alternative, but are commonly optimized for forward prediction rather than state estimation. We propose Deep Koopman Sensing, a data-driven reduced-order DA framework that combines a nonlinear autoencoder with parameter-conditioned linear latent dynamics approximating the Koopman operator. We compare the proposed model with parametric dynamic mode decomposition (pDMD), a multilayer perceptron (MLP), and xLSTM across four benchmarks: 1D viscous Burgers, 2D flow past a cylinder, 2D dambreak, and 3D flow past a sphere. Our results reveal a marked distinction between forecasting and sensing: open-loop accuracy does not reliably predict assimilation performance, while Deep Koopman Sensing achieves the lowest assimilation error across all four benchmarks. More importantly, with an extended Kalman filter, incorporating sensor measurements improves the estimates of both linear latent models across all four benchmarks, whereas it degrades the nonlinear models, despite their strong open-loop performance. With ensemble filtering, the nonlinear models are no longer degraded by assimilation, while the Koopman model still attains the lowest assimilation error. These results show that latent dynamics should be designed for the downstream estimation task rather than selected solely for forecast accuracy, and demonstrate Koopman-based reduced-order modeling as an effective approach for real-time flow reconstruction from sparse, streaming measurements.

physics.flu-dyn↗