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Breaking swell waves at Hermosa Beach, California. A swell, also sometimes referred to as ground swell, in the context of an ocean, sea or lake, is a series of mechanical waves that propagate along the interface between water and air under the predominating influence of gravity, and thus are often referred to as surface gravity waves.
Wind-wave dissipation or "swell dissipation" is process in which a wave generated via a weather system loses its mechanical energy transferred from the atmosphere via wind. Wind waves, as their name suggests, are generated by wind transferring energy from the atmosphere to the ocean's surface, capillary gravity waves play an essential role in ...
In fluid dynamics, a wind wave, or wind-generated water wave, is a surface wave that occurs on the free surface of bodies of water as a result of the wind blowing over the water's surface. The contact distance in the direction of the wind is known as the fetch. Waves in the oceans can travel thousands of kilometers before reaching land.
Wave power is the capture of energy of wind waves to do useful work – for example, electricity generation, desalination, or pumping water. A machine that exploits wave power is a wave energy converter (WEC). Waves are generated primarily by wind passing over the sea's surface and also by tidal forces, temperature variations, and other factors.
Cross swell at Île de Ré, France.The waves themselves are examples of cnoidal waves. Cross sea near Lisbon, Portugal.. A cross sea (also referred to as a squared sea or square waves [a]) is a sea state of wind-generated ocean waves that form nonparallel wave systems.
Two main processes can explain the transfer of energy from the short wind waves to the long infragravity waves, and both are important in shallow water and for steep wind waves. The most common process is the subharmonic interaction of trains of wind waves which was first observed by Munk and Tucker and explained by Longuet-Higgins and Stewart. [5]
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In fluid dynamics, wind wave modeling describes the effort to depict the sea state and predict the evolution of the energy of wind waves using numerical techniques.These simulations consider atmospheric wind forcing, nonlinear wave interactions, and frictional dissipation, and they output statistics describing wave heights, periods, and propagation directions for regional seas or global oceans.