Characterizing Energy Dissipation of Shallow-Water Breaking Waves in a Storm Surge*

While understanding breaking waves is crucial for the development of parameterizations used in modeling ocean and climate, the complete description of wave breaking is not well understood. We present direct numerical simulations of two-dimensional solitary waves that break on a uniform beach in shallow water, including storm surge represented by an inshore region. The storm surge depth, beach slope, and breaker amplitude are varied to study the breaker property dependence on wave and bathymetric parameters. We classify breaker types and find a separation between plunging and spilling breakers when scaled by wave breaking amplitude and depth. We compare energy dissipation during the breaking process with results from the literature without storm surge. A representation of energy dissipation in this solitary wave breaker data is also compared with prior experiments and simulations of breakers in deep water, and possibilities of a unifying model are explored. We conclude that a previously developed shallow-water inertial dissipation model for wave breaking on a uniform slope can be extended to this storm surge environment with good data collapse.