A physical model of sea wave period from altimeter data

Abstract

A physical model for sea wave period from altimeter data is presented. Physical roots of the model are in recent advances of the theory of weak turbulence of wind-driven waves that predicts the link of instant wave energy to instant energy flux to/from waves. The model operates with wave height and its spatial derivative and does not refer to normalized radar cross-section r 0 measured by the altimeter. Thus, the resulting formula for wave period does not contain any empirical parameters and does not require features of particular satellite altimeter or any calibration for specific region of measurements. A single case study illustrates consistency of the new approach with previously proposed empirical models in terms of estimates of wave periods and their statistical distributions. The paper brings attention to the possible corruption of dynamical parameters such as wave steepness or energy fluxes to/from waves when using the empirical approaches. Applications of the new model to the studies of sea wave dynamics are discussed.

Small‐scale open ocean currents have large effects on wind wave heights

“…At shorter scales, the relative wind and advection effects become more important. Previous discussions of H s gradients have emphasized the importance of wind variability [ Abdalla and Cavaleri , ] or nonlinear wave evolution [ Badulin , ; Kudryavtsev et al ., ]. Our results suggest that current effects cannot be ignored at scales shorter than 200 km.…”

Universality of sea wave growth and its physical roots

“…However, the coefficients ε 0 , σ 0 and the exponents p τ (p χ ), q τ (q χ ) of such parameterizations vary in a certain moderately wide range (e.g. 0.7 < p χ < 1.1, see Table 2 Badulin et al 2007a). Evidence of this variability sometimes leads to the scepsis about existence of any universality in the wind-driven seas: 'Perhaps it is time to abandon the idea that a universal power law for non-dimensional fetch-limited growth rate is anything more than an idealization'.…”

“…• Ubiquity of self-similar regimes in wind-driven seas (e.g. Zakharov 2005;Badulin et al 2005Badulin et al , 2007a; Gagnaire-Renou et al 2011). The relationship (1.4) presented as a universal law of growth of wind waves looks paradoxical.…”

Satellite Monitoring of the Ocean Climate Parameters. Part 2

“…Модифициро-ванные и дополненные новыми параметрами глобальные базы данных о вол-нении позволяют значительно расширить область применения спутниковых данных в задачах мониторинга окружающей среды, оценки вероятности экс-тремальных событий, а также диагностики и прогноза климатических изме-нений на региональных и глобальных масштабах (Badulin, 2014;Григорьева, Бадулин, 2016;Гавриков и др., 2016;Badulin et al, 2017). На рис.…”