Understanding the dynamics of breaking waves is one of the most difficult fundamental problems in the ocean sciences. Wave breaking produces turbulent flows populated by intense short-lived 3D vortex structures, air cavities and aerated regions. The structure and dynamics of these vortices and cavities have never been fully examined in the field due to the difficulty of sampling the flow in a synoptic way. The PI requests funding to develop Lagrangian drifters to examine the temporal evolution of individual waves as they break using drifters equipped with miniature accelerometers and gyroscopes, GPS units, video camera and pressure sensors, to reconstruct the 3D distribution of turbulence, dissipation, bubble entrainment and pressure in spilling and plunging gravity waves. These drifters will act as inertial particles which will be entrained in the breaking region. The drifter movements will be used as a proxy for the velocity and turbulence structure of the breaker, and spectral analysis will be employed to relate the high-frequency data with the large-scale decay of individual waves.
Broader Impacts:
The proposed instrumentation has the potential to impact our understanding of the wave breaking process and provide needed observational constraints on model outputs. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of these impacts: wave breaking plays an important role in air-sea exchange processes and a fundamental role in the production of marine aerosols. Training of minority graduate and undergraduate students in an area (Puerto Rico, Caribbean) where such opportunities are relatively scarce. The proposed work will help establish a coastal research effort at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez. It will entrain students in Puerto Rico into study of the coastal environment, most of whom will be Hispanic.
