The role of bandwidth in setting the breaking slope threshold of deep-water focusing wave packets

Abstract

We examine the role of wave packet bandwidth in modulating the breaking slope threshold for focusing deep-water surface gravity wave packets. Using a fully nonlinear potential flow solver and laboratory experiments, we show that the slope threshold may be strongly modulated by the wave packet bandwidth. We propose a new breaking threshold parameterization that shows that the slope threshold may be modulated by more than a factor of two by changes in the bandwidth. This has implications for parameterizations of the properties of the breaking induced flow (e.g., the energy dissipation) as they do not currently account for these effects.