Linear dynamics of wind waves in coupled turbulent air—water flow. Part 1. Theory

Abstract

When air blows over water the wind exerts a stress at the interface thereby inducing in the water a sheared turbulent drift current. We present scaling arguments showing that, if a wind suddenly starts blowing, then the sheared drift current grows in depth on a timescale that is larger than the wave period, but smaller than a timescale for wave growth. This argument suggests that the drift current can influence growth of waves of wavelength λ that travel parallel to the wind at speedc.In narrow ‘inner’ regions either side of the interface, turbulence in the air and water flows is close to local equilibrium; whereas above and below, in ‘outer’ regions, the wave alters the turbulence through rapid distortion. The depth scale,la, of the inner region in the air flow increases withc/u*a(u*ais the unperturbed friction velocity in the wind). And so we classify the flow into different regimes according to the ratiola/λ. We show that different turbulence models are appropriate for the different flow regimes.When (u*a+c)/UB(λ) [Lt ] 1 (UB(z) is the unperturbed wind speed)lais much smaller than λ. In this limit, asymptotic solutions are constructed for the fully coupled turbulent flows in the air and water, thereby extending previous analyses of flow over irrotational water waves. The solutions show that, as in calculations of flow over irrotational waves, the air flow is asymmetrically displaced around the wave by a non-separated sheltering effect, which tends to make the waves grow. But coupling the air flow perturbations to the turbulent flow in the water reduces the growth rate of the waves by a factor of about two. This reduction is caused by two distinct mechanisms. Firstly, wave growth is inhibited because the turbulent water flow is also asymmetrically displaced around the wave by non-separated sheltering. According to our model, this first effect is numerically small, but much larger erroneous values can be obtained if the rapid-distortion mechanism is not accounted for in the outer region of the water flow. (For example, we show that if the mixing-length model is used in the outer region all waves decay!) Secondly, non-separated sheltering in the air flow (and hence the wave growth rate) is reduced by the additional perturbations needed to satisfy the boundary condition that shear stress is continuous across the interface.