Generalized Shallow Water Wave Growth from Lake George
Publication: Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
Volume 133, Issue 3
Abstract
Probably the best set of observations of wave growth in shallow water presently available has been acquired in 1996 by Young and Verhagen in Lake George, Australia. These observations were taken during nominally ideal conditions of a constant wind, in fetch-limited conditions, over water with a constant depth (wind from the North or South, along the main axis of the elongated lake). However, we found a north-south stratification in the data that Young and Verhagen ignored. This stratification suggests that the wave growth was affected by the tapering of the lake in southern-wind conditions but not in northern-wind conditions (when the upwind lake is wider). This interpretation was supported by computations with a numerical wave model. We therefore removed the southern-wind data and reanalyzed the northern wind data to reformulate the growth curves for the significant wave height and peak period. For young sea states (relatively deep and transitional water depths), we find considerably higher (by 30%)—but not longer—waves than the original authors, in agreement with a widely accepted compilation of other wave growth data. For fully developed conditions (in shallow water), our results agree well with those of the original authors.
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Acknowledgments
The writers greatly appreciate the enthusiastic support of the original authors of the Lake George data, Ian Young and Louis Verhagen. They were just as keen to understand the effect of the shape of Lake George on the wave growth as we were. They gave us free access to their data, including details that have not been published (e.g., the labeling of the observations for northern and southern winds and the exact numerical values of the wind speed and depth and many other details that we investigated, such as wind gustiness, water temperature, and air temperature). We sincerely thank Gerbrant van Vledder of Alkyon Hydraulic Consultancy and Research B.V. (The Netherlands) for permission to use his code of the WRT approach to compute the quadruplet wave-wave interactions and Marcel Zijlema of Delft University of Technology for his assistance during the computations. In addition, we want to thank Vladimir Makin and Albert Jacobs of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute for their expert advice on the evolution of the wind field over a lake such as Lake George. The writers gratefully acknowledge the valuable suggestions of the (anonymous) reviewers of the manuscript.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
Volume 133 • Issue 3 • May 2007
Pages: 173 - 182
Copyright
© 2007 ASCE.
History
Received: May 10, 2005
Accepted: Mar 7, 2006
Published online: May 1, 2007
Published in print: May 2007
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