No Arabic abstract
The nonlinear dynamics of waves at the sea surface is believed to be ruled by the Weak Turbulence framework. In order to investigate the nonlinear coupling among gravity surface waves, we developed an experiment in the Coriolis facility which is a 13-m diameter circular tank. An isotropic and statistically stationary wave turbulence of average steepness of 10% is maintained by two wedge wave makers. The space and time resolved wave elevation is measured using a stereoscopic technique. Wave-wave interactions are analyzed through third and fourth order correlations. We investigate specifically the role of bound waves generated by non resonant 3-wave coupling. Specifically, we implement a space-time filter to separate the dynamics of free waves (i.e. following the dispersion relation) from the bound waves. We observe that the free wave dynamics causes weak resonant 4-wave correlations. A weak level of correlation is actually the basis of the Weak Turbulence Theory. Thus our observations support the use of the Weak Turbulence to model gravity wave turbulence as is currently been done in the operational models of wave forecasting. Although in the theory bound waves are not supposed to contribute to the energy cascade, our observation raises the question of the impact of bound waves on dissipation and thus on energy transfers as well.
We investigate experimentally turbulence of surface gravity waves in the Coriolis facility in Grenoble by using both high sensitivity local probes and a time and space resolved stereoscopic reconstruction of the water surface. We show that the water deformation is made of the superposition of weakly nonlinear waves following the linear dispersion relation and of bound waves resulting from non resonant triadic interaction. Although the theory predicts a 4-wave resonant coupling supporting the presence of an inverse cascade of wave action, we do not observe such inverse cascade. We investigate 4-wave coupling by computing the tricoherence i.e. 4-wave correlations. We observed very weak values of the tricoherence at the frequencies excited on the linear dispersion relation that are consistent with the hypothesis of weak coupling underlying the weak turbulence theory.
We report on the observation of surface gravity wave turbulence at scales larger than the forcing ones in a large basin. In addition to the downscale transfer usually reported in gravity wave turbulence, an upscale transfer is observed, interpreted as the inverse cascade of weak turbulence theory. A steady state is achieved when the inverse cascade reaches a scale in between the forcing wavelength and the basin size, but far from the latter. This inverse cascade saturation, which depends on the wave steepness, is probably due to the emergence of nonlinear dissipative structures such as sharp-crested waves.
We report on the observation of gravity-capillary wave turbulence on the surface of a fluid in a high-gravity environment. By using a large-diameter centrifuge, the effective gravity acceleration is tuned up to 20 times the Earth gravity. The transition frequency between the gravity and capillary regimes is thus increased up to one decade as predicted theoretically. A frequency power-law wave spectrum is observed in each regime and is found to be independent of the gravity level and of the wave steepness. While the timescale separation required by weak turbulence is well verified experimentally regardless of the gravity level, the nonlinear and dissipation timescales are found to be independent of the scale, as a result of the finite size effects of the system (large-scale container modes) that are not taken currently into account theoretically.
We consider interactions between surface and interfacial waves in the two layer system. Our approach is based on the Hamiltonian structure of the equations of motion, and includes the general procedure for diagonalization of the quadratic part of the Hamiltonian. Such diagonalization allows us to derive the interaction crossection between surface and interfacial waves and to derive the coupled kinetic equations describing spectral energy transfers in this system. Our kinetic equation allows resonant and near resonant interactions. We find that the energy transfers are dominated by the class III resonances of cite{Alam}. We apply our formalism to calculate the rate of growth for interfacial waves for different values of the wind velocity. Using our kinetic equation, we also consider the energy transfer from the wind generated surface waves to interfacial waves for the case when the spectrum of the surface waves is given by the JONSWAP spectrum and interfacial waves are initially absent. We find that such energy transfer can occur along a timescale of hours; there is a range of wind speeds for the most effective energy transfer at approximately the wind speed corresponding to white capping of the sea. Furthermore, interfacial waves oblique to the direction of the wind are also generated.
We report results of sumulation of wave turbulence. Both inverse and direct cascades are observed. The definition of mesoscopic turbulence is given. This is a regime when the number of modes in a system involved in turbulence is high enough to qualitatively simulate most of the processes but significantly smaller then the threshold which gives us quantitative agreement with the statistical description, such as kinetic equation. Such a regime takes place in numerical simulation, in essentially finite systems, etc.