Application of Regular Waves Predictive Formulas for Anticipating the Inception of Breaking in Random Waves

Wave breaking has always been an important phenomenon for coastal engineers since it often dominates other physical processes active in nearshore. Since an irregular wave can be decomposed into a number of regular waves, one can enhance predictive formulas for regular waves to estimate the breaker width and significant breaking height of an irregular wave field. In this article a numerical analysis has been carried out to investigate the applicability of available regular wave breaking formulas to predict the breaking inception of random waves and the corresponding wave height. Bed slopes ranging from 0.01 to 0.1 and also wave steepness ranging from 0.01 to 0.05 were considered. The Results are compared with Kamphuis formula which is one of the most common and reliable formulas for random breaking waves. The results reveal that McCowan and Goda type formulas yielded the best results in this kind of analysis.