On the geometry of ocean surface waves

The factors influencing the atmosphere-ocean transfer of mass and momentum, as well as incipient wave breaking and the amount of energy dissipated due to breaking, are discussed in detail. In particular, the influence of directional spreading on the statistics of surface wave slopes and the area of the wind-roughened ocean surface is demonstrated. Theoretical analysis and comparison with the available experimental data show that unimodal directional spreading is not able to reproduce the observed ratio of the cross-wind/up-wind mean square slopes. Better agreement is achieved when bimodal directional spreading, consisting of two wrapped-Gaussian distributions, is applied. The bimodal form suggested by Ewans (1998) is used in the paper. Moreover, the formulae developed here show that the increase in the area due to surface waves is rather small for both regular and irregular waves.