Knowledge on intermittency of wave breaking is so far limited to a few summary statistics, while the probability distribution of time interval between breaking events can provide a full view of intermittency. Based on a series of experiments on wind wave breaking, such probability distributions are investigated. Breaking waves within a wave group were taken as a single breaking event according to recent studies. Interval between successive wave groups with breaker is the focus of this paper. For intervals in our experiments with different fetch and wind conditions, their distributions are all skewed and weighted on small intervals. Results of Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests on time series of these intervals indicate that they all follow gamma distribution, and some are even exponential type. Average breaking-group-interval decreases with friction velocity and significant steepness until the wind is strong enough;most of them are more than 10 times the dominant wave period. Group breaking probability proposed by Babanin recently and the average number of breaking waves in wave groups are also discussed, and they are seemingly more reasonable and sensitive than traditional breaking probability defined in terms of single wave.
The existence of three well-defined tongue-shaped zones of swell dominance,termed as 'swell pools',in the Pacific,the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans,was reported by Chen et al.(2002)using satellite data.In this paper,the ECMWF Re-analyses wind wave data,including wind speed,significant wave height,averaged wave period and direction,are applied to verify the existence of these swell pools.The swell indices calculated from wave height,wave age and correlation coefficient are used to identify swell events.The wave age swell index can be more appropriately related to physical processes compared to the other two swell indices.Based on the ECMWF data the swell pools in the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans are confirmed,but the expected swell pool in the Indian Ocean is not pronounced.The seasonal variations of global and hemispherical swell indices are investigated,and the argument that swells in the pools seemed to originate mostly from the winter hemisphere is supported by the seasonal variation of the averaged wave direction.The northward bending of the swell pools in the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans in summer is not revealed by the ECMWF data.The swell pool in the Indian Ocean and the summer northward bending of the swell pools in the Pacific and the Atlan-tic Oceans need to be further verified by other datasets.
In this study, the impact of atmospherewave coupling on typhoon intensity was investigated using numerical simulations of an idealized typhoon in a coupled atmospherewaveocean modeling system. The coupling between atmosphere and sea surface waves considered the effects of wave state and sea sprays on airsea momentum flux, the atmospheric lowlevel dissipative heating, and the wavestateaffected sea spray heat flux. Several experiments were conducted to examine the impacts of wave state, sea sprays, and dissipative heating on an idealized typhoon system. Results show that considering the wave state and seasprayaffected seasurface roughness reduces typhoon intensity, while including dissipative heating intensifies the typhoon system. Taking into account sea spray heat flux also strengthens the typhoon system with increasing maximum wind speed and significant wave height. The overall impact of atmospherewave coupling makes a positive contribution to the intensification of the idealized typhoon system. The minimum central pressure simulated by the coupled atmospherewave experiment was 16.4 hPa deeper than that of the control run, and the maximum wind speed and significant wave height increased by 31% and 4%, respectively. Meanwhile, within the area beneath the typhoon center, the average total upward airsea heat flux increased by 22%, and the averaged latent heat flux increased more significantly by 31% compared to the uncoupled run.
