Non-hydrostatic modeling of surf zone wave dynamics

Abstract Non-hydrostatic models such as Surface WAves till SHore (SWASH) resolve many of the relevant physics in coastal wave propagation such as dispersion, shoaling, refraction, dissipation and nonlinearity. However, for efficiency, they assume a single-valued surface and therefore do not resolve some aspects of breaking waves such as wave overturning, turbulence generation, and air entrainment. To study the ability of such models to represent nonlinear wave dynamics and statistics in a dissipative surf zone, we compare simulations with SWASH to flume observations of random, unidirectional waves, incident on a 1:30 planar beach. The experimental data includes a wide variation in the incident wave fields, so that model performance can be studied over a large range of wave conditions. Our results show that, without specific calibration, the model accurately predicts second-order bulk parameters such as wave height and period, the details of the spectral evolution, and higher-order statistics, such as skewness and asymmetry of the waves. Monte Carlo simulations show that the model can capture the principal features of the wave probability density function in the surf zone, and that the spectral distribution of dissipation in SWASH is proportional to the frequency squared, which is consistent with observations reported by earlier studies. These results show that relatively efficient non-hydrostatic models such as SWASH can be successfully used to parametrize surf zone wave processes.