Abstract
Abstract. Runup of long irregular waves on a plane beach is studied experimentally in the water flume at the University of Warwick. Statistics of wave runup (displacement and velocity of the moving shoreline and their extreme values) is analyzed for the incident wave field with the narrow band spectrum for different amplitudes of incident waves (different values of the breaking parameter Brσ). It is shown experimentally that the distribution of the shoreline velocity does not depend on Brσ and coincides with the distribution of the vertical velocity in the incident wave field as it is predicted in the statistical theory of nonlinear long wave runup. Statistics of runup amplitudes shows the same behavior as that of the incident wave amplitudes. However, the distribution of the wave runup on a beach differs from the statistics of the incident wave elevation. The mean sea level at the coast rises with an increase in Brσ causing wave set-up on a beach, which agrees with the theoretical predictions. At the same time values of skewness and kurtosis for wave runup are similar to those for the incident wave field and they might be used for the forecast of sea floods at the coast.
Highlights
IntroductionRunup of irregular non-breaking waves was theoretically studied by Didenkulova et al (2011), where the nonlinear shallow water theory was applied to beaches of constant slope
The prediction of possible flooding and properties of the water flow on the coast is an important practical task for physical oceanography and coastal engineering, which results in numerous empirical formulas describing runup characteristics of wind waves and swell available in the engineering literature
It is shown experimentally that the distribution of the shoreline velocity does not depend on Brσ and coincides with the distribution of the vertical velocity in the incident wave field as it is predicted in the statistical theory of nonlinear long wave runup
Summary
Runup of irregular non-breaking waves was theoretically studied by Didenkulova et al (2011), where the nonlinear shallow water theory was applied to beaches of constant slope. In the statistical approach, Didenkulova et al (2011) have found relationships between distributions of wave runup, shoreline velocity and statistics of the incoming irregular wave field. Didenkulova et al (2011) demonstrated that the nonlinearity does not change the statistics of the shoreline velocity, but does influence the statistics of wave runup displacement, resulting in a change to its statistical moments. The shallow water theory and the main theoretical results are briefly discussed in Sect. 4. The experimental results on statistics of wave runup are discussed, culminating with conclusions in Sect.
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