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A wave basin experiment has been performed in the MARINTEK laboratories, in one of the largest existing three-dimensional wave tanks in the world. The aim of the experiment is to investigate the effects of directional energy distribution on the statistical properties of surface gravity waves. Different degrees of directionality have been considered, starting from long-crested waves up to directional distributions with a spread of ±30• at the spectral peak. Particular attention is given to the tails of the distribution function of the surface elevation, wave heights and wave crests.Comparison with a simplified model based on second-order theory is reported. The results show that for long-crested, steep and narrow-banded waves, the second-order theory underestimates the probability of occurrence of large waves. As directional effects are included, the departure from second-order theory becomes less accentuated and the surface elevation is characterized by weak deviations from Gaussian statistics.

We propose a new approach for modeling weakly nonlinear waves, based on enhancing truncated amplitude equations with exact linear dispersion. Our example is based on the nonlinear Schrödinger ͑NLS͒ equation for deep-water waves. The enhanced NLS equation reproduces exactly the conditions for nonlinear four-wave resonance ͑the ''figure 8'' of Phillips͒ even for bandwidths greater than unity. Sideband instability for uniform Stokes waves is limited to finite bandwidths only, and agrees well with exact results of McLean; therefore, sideband instability cannot produce energy leakage to high-wave-number modes for the enhanced equation, as reported previously for the NLS equation. The new equation is extractable from the Zakharov integral equation, and can be regarded as an intermediate between the latter and the NLS equation. Being solvable numerically at no additional cost in comparison with the NLS equation, the new model is physically and numerically attractive for investigation of wave evolution.

Simulations have been performed with a fairly narrow band numerical gravity wave model (higher-order NLS type) and a computational domain of dimensions 128 × 128 typical wavelengths. The simulations are initiated with s 6 × 10 4 Fourier modes corresponding to truncated JONSWAP spectra and different angular distributions giving both short-and long-crested waves. A development of the spectra on the so-called Benjamin-Feir timescale is seen, similar to the one reported by Dysthe et al. (J. Fluid Mech. vol. 478, 2003, P. 1). The probability distributions of surface elevation and crest height are found to fit theoretical distributions found by Tayfun (J. Geophys. Res. vol. 85, 1980Res. vol. 85, , p. 1548) very well for elevations up to four standard deviations (for realistic angular spectral distributions). Moreover, in this range of the distributions, the influence of the spectral evolution seems insignificant. For the extreme parts of the distributions a significant correlation with the spectral change can be seen for very long-crested waves. For this case we find that the density of large waves increases during spectral change, in agreement with a recent experimental study by Onorato et al. (J. Fluid Mech. 2004 submitted).