Abstract
Dispersion of a passive tracer by water waves is of significant importance for many scientific and technological problems including bio-diversity of marine life, ecological impact of anthropogenic incidents, planning of rescue operation and global oceanic transport. Formally, turbulent dispersion of a passive tracer by surface waves is a Brownian motion caused by a prescribed noise, viz., random fluctuations of the wave field. From this perspective, it is similar to the conventional dispersion by tracer particles by turbulent flows initially described in the seminal work of Richardson, Taylor and Obukhov. The additional challenges of this problem are imposed by the complexity of the underlining wave field—different dispersion relations and correlation structure, directionality and its spread, wave breaking—and this complexity necessitates further theoretical and experimental research. The aim of the present study is experimental validation of scaling relations for the mean drift and mean variance of tracer particles predicted by the wave turbulence theory. We report results of a set of targeted experiments in a large three-dimensional wave tank where the positions of the tracer particles—modelled as surface drifters—were tracked down with optical cameras. The experimental data are analysed and discussed in the light of the weak turbulence theory.
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This work received financial support from the US Navy Office of Naval Research Global (Grant N62909-17-1-2143).
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Responsible Editor: Alejandro Orfila
This article is part of the Topical Collection on the International Conference of Marine Science ICMS2018, the 3rd Latin American Symposium on Water Waves (LatWaves 2018), Medellin, Colombia, 19-23 November 2018 and the XVIII National Seminar on Marine Sciences and Technologies (SENALMAR), Barranquilla, Colombia 22-25 October 2019
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Violante-Carvalho, N., Skvortsov, A., Babanin, A. et al. The turbulent dispersion of surface drifters by water waves: experimental study. Ocean Dynamics 71, 379–389 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-020-01423-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-020-01423-y