SEMINAR: Short tutorial on deterministic nonlinear ocean gravity wave dynamics

[Jorge <jwillemsen@rsmas.miami.edu>]

I have thought to offer the last lecture in AMP 575 as a tutorial as cited in the subject line.  Most students who will move on to study ocean waves in the future will be immersed in the most practical manner of modelling ocean waves, the "Transport", or "Hasselmann" model or one of its cousins.  While these formalisms are useful for studying realistic ocean wave conditions over very large scales they sacrifice something for this utility - they totally drop all phase information in the wave field.  Thus phenomena such as interference are totally out of their scope.

There exists a parallel formalism based on first principles which retains the full deterministic wave dynamics.  Its starting point is simply the energy density functional, or "Hamiltonian", from which canonical equations of motion are derived.  There are steps in arriving at useful equations that are perturbative in nature - but the perturbation parameter is the wave slope, which is limited due to wave breaking, making an expansion in terms of the slope quite accurate.

In this short tutorial this picture will be fleshed out.  In addition there will be a discussion of driving and dissipation terms that are introduced to arrive at results in agreement with those of the transport formalism where these overlap - but some exceptions are noted as well.

This leads to the conclusion that the Hamiltonian formalism is ideally suited to studying fundamental processes in ocean wave dynamics.

All are welcome to attend:  Wed. 11/28 1:30-2:45 p.m. in the AMP conference room.

-- 
Professor Jorge Willemsen
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science
University of Miami
4600 Rickenbacker Causeway
Miami, FL  33149
305-421-4199
jwillemsen@rsmas.miami.edu