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A laboratory study of wave crest statistics and the role of directional spreading

This paper concerns the crest height statistics arising in sea states that are broad banded in both frequency and direction. A new set of laboratory observations are presented and the results compared with the commonly applied statistical distributions. Taken as a whole, the data confirm that the crest-height distributions are critically dependent upon the directionality of the sea state. Although nonlinear effects arising at third order and above are most pronounced in uni-directional seas, the present data show that they are also important in directionally spread seas, provided the seas are sufficiently steep and not too short crested. The data also highlight the limiting effects of wave breaking. With individual breaking events dependent upon the local wave steepness, the directionality of the sea state again plays a significant role. Indeed, the present observations confirm that the two competing processes of nonlinear amplification and wave breaking can have a profound influence on the crest-height distributions leading to significant departures from established theory. In such cases, the key parameters are the sea state steepness and directional spread; the latter acting to counter the former in terms of nonlinear changes in the crest-height distributions.