Wind Wave Prediction
Oral
Ian Young, PhD
Professor of Engineering
University Of Melbourne
A combination of data obtained in hurricane conditions from: satellite altimeters, airborne observations, insitu data and numerical modelling has provided a comprehensive description of wind wave generation in such cases. This presentation will outline a consistent description of the spatial distribution of waves and the spectral form under hurricane conditions. Ocean wave spectra obtained from hurricanes are surprisingly similar to simple fetch-limited situations, which enables the use of fetch-limited growth relationships even in these apparently complex cases. This rather simple scaling is shown to be a result of nonlinear interactions which govern the spectral evolution in these situations.