Ocean waves lose energy and die out even when they never crash against a shore or break into foam.
Physical models have struggled for sixty years to explain why waves calm down in the middle of the open ocean. This new law shows that waves transfer their energy into underwater turbulence through a hidden vortex force. Satellite data confirms that current ocean models have been systematically miscalculating wave heights because they ignored this silent decay. Understanding this process allows for much more accurate weather and shipping forecasts. The energy of the ocean is constantly bleeding into the deep in ways we never noticed.
A universal law for non-breaking surface wave decay
research_square · rs-9184188
Abstract Macroscopic friction can emerge from microscopic fluctuations whose mean vanishes but whose autocorrelation does not. Here we use this statistical-mechanical route to resolve a sixty-year-old problem in ocean wave physics, how non-breaking surface waves lose energy to upper-ocean turbulence. The Navier-Stokes equations contain a stochastic vortex force (the coupling between wave orbital motion and turbulent vorticity fluctuations) that classical wave-current theory discards because its