Francesco de Vita (IJLRDA) - Breaking waves due to modulational instability

The breaking of free surface waves plays an important role on the gas, heat, momentum and energy exchanges taking place across the air-sea interface and is also responsible for the dissipation of a large fraction of the wave energy, representing the most important dissipation term in wave forecasting approaches. In order to achieve a better understanding of the phenomenon we investigated the breaking generated by modulational instability numerically by the two-fluids approach using the open source Gerris code. The solution is initialized as a fundamental wave component with two sideband disturbances and it is left to evolve in a computational domain with periodic boundary conditions. Results are presented in terms of energy amount dissipated by the whole breaking process and changes operated to the pre-breaking spectra.