Boussinesq Modelling of Rip Currents on Barred Beach

Abstract Rip current is quite common in coastal zone and plays a key role in coastal engineering related issues, for example, nearshore pollutants transport and coastal morphology. Among variety of documented research results on rip current, the experiment of Haller(1999) is widely used for validating the nearshore circulation models, such as Boussinesq- type wave model. However to authors’ knowledge, simplifications on spatial and time scales are always made during Boussinesq-type simulation. In the present paper, a 2D wave breaking model based on fully nonlinear Boussinesq equation is adopted to reproduce Haller's experiment under full spatial and time scale conditions. The numerical results including wave height, setup down\up, mean current (field) are compared against the experimental data and good agreements are obtained.