Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

On The Shoaling Of Solitary Waves In The Presence Of Short Random Waves, Miao Tian, Alex Sheremet, James M. Kaihatu, Gangfeng Ma

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Overhead video from a small number of laboratory tests conducted by Kaihatu et al. at the Tsunami Wave Basin at Oregon State University shows that the breaking point of a shoaling solitary wave shifts to deeper water if random waves are present. The analysis of the laboratory data collected confirms that solitary waves indeed tend to break earlier in the presence of random wave field, and suggests that the effect is the result of the radiation stresses gradient induced by the random wave fields. A theoretical approach based on the forced KdV equation is shown to successfully predict the shoaling …