Ivan Savelyev

The thermal signature of a submerged jet impacting normal to a free surface

Graphical Abstract

Infrared imagery of streak formation in a breaking wave

High resolution infrared imagery of breaking waves in a wave-tank free of wind shear or current reveals the production of a “streaky,” quasi-periodic thermal pattern produced during the breaking process. The streaks, or elongated patterns of warm and cold fluid, are found to form only when surface turbulence is present before wave breaking occurs. This suggests that wave-turbulence interaction is one mechanism that can lead to streak formation in breaking wave systems. More specifically, the streaky structures observed in these experiments may be caused by an intense, rapid tilting, and stretching of pre-existing vertical vorticity by the Stokes drift generated at or near the breaking wave crests, thereby generating a coherent system of counter-rotating vortices. We attempt to relate our observations to the recent theory of Teixeira and Belcher [J. Fluid Mech. 458, 229–267 (2002)10.1017/S0022112002007838]. Some properties of the streaks, such as the dependence of their lifetimes and spanwise scale on wave...

Experimental Study on Wind-Wave Momentum Flux in Strongly Forced Conditions

AbstractA quantitative description of wind-wave momentum transfer in high wind conditions is necessary for accurate wave models, storm and hurricane forecasting, and models that require atmosphere–ocean coupling such as circulation and mixed layer models. In this work, a static pressure probe mounted on a vertical wave follower to investigate relatively strong winds (U10 up to 26.9 m s−1 and U10/Cp up to 16.6) above waves in laboratory conditions. The main goal of the paper is to quantify the effect of wave shape and airflow sheltering on the momentum transfer and wave growth. Primary results are formulated in terms of wind forcing and wave steepness ak, where a is wave amplitude and k is wave number. It is suggested that, within the studied range (ak up to 0.19), the airflow is best described by the nonseparated sheltering theory. Notably, a small amount of spray and breaking waves was present at the highest wind speeds; however, their effect on the momentum flux was not found to be significant within st...

CASPER: Coupled Air-Sea Processes and Electromagnetic (EM) ducting Research

CapsuleCASPER objective is to improve our capability to characterize the propagation of radio frequency (RF) signals through the marine atmosphere with coordinated efforts in data collection, data analyses, and modeling of the air-sea interaction processes, refractive environment, and RF propagation.

Surface thermal structure in a shallow-water, vertical discharge from a coastal power plant

The surface temperature field induced by a turbulent buoyant jet, discharging upwards into shallow water and impinging on the water surface, is examined for the case of a power-plant cooling-water outfall off the southern California coast. The data, acquired using an airborne infrared camera, capture the evolution of turbulent-scale structure, as well as the advection of larger-scale patterns that can be used to infer the surface velocity. Some limited in-water measurements were also made. When the ambient, or receiving, water is relatively stagnant, the buoyant fluid moves nearly symmetrically outward from the impingement zone, and both the thermal and velocity fields decay over a radial distance of several tens of meters. Flow in this symmetric case appears to remain supercritical into the far-field, which differs from a recent numerical modeling study that predicts a near-field hydraulic jump. Within the plume, the data show an expanding set of thermal bands, similar to ring-like structures found in laboratory studies of a buoyant vertical jet having a stable near-field. In the presence of an alongshore current, both the plume and thermal bands become stretched out in the downstream direction; but this effect can be accounted for, and the thermal structure made symmetrical, by using an approximate two-dimensional model of the flow field. Characteristics of the observed thermal bands are compared against three ring-creation mechanisms proposed in the literature (jet vortex instability, horizontal shear instability, and internal bore formation), but the present dataset is insufficient to discriminate amongst them.

Airborne Remote Sensing of the Upper Ocean Turbulence during CASPER-East

This study takes on the challenge of resolving upper ocean surface currents with a suite of airborne remote sensing methodologies, simultaneously imaging the ocean surface in visible, infrared, and microwave bands. A series of flights were conducted over an air-sea interaction supersite established 63 km offshore by a large multi-platform CASPER-East experiment. The supersite was equipped with a range of in situ instruments resolving air-sea interface and underwater properties, of which a bottom-mounted acoustic Doppler current profiler was used extensively in this paper for the purposes of airborne current retrieval validation and interpretation. A series of water-tracing dye releases took place in coordination with aircraft overpasses, enabling dye plume velocimetry over 100 m to 10 km spatial scales. Similar scales were resolved by a Multichannel Synthetic Aperture Radar, which resolved a swath of instantaneous surface velocities (wave and current) with 10 m resolution and 5 cm/s accuracy. Details of the skin temperature variability imprinted by the upper ocean turbulence were revealed in 1–14,000 m range of spatial scales by a mid-wave infrared camera. Combined, these methodologies provide a unique insight into the complex spatial structure of the upper ocean turbulence on a previously under-resolved range of spatial scales from meters to kilometers. However, much attention in this paper is dedicated to quantifying and understanding uncertainties and ambiguities associated with these remote sensing methodologies, especially regarding the smallest resolvable turbulent scales and reference depths of retrieved currents.

Laboratory measurements of wave-induced turbulence using thermal marking velocimetry

Some theoretical considerations suggest an existence of wave-turbulence energy flux without wave breaking, but scarce empirical results struggle to establish the existence of such process. This study utilizes infrared imaging to investigate the effect of wave motion on near-surface turbulence. An active thermography technique called Thermal Marking Velocimetry (TMV) technique was used in a laboratory wave tank. TMV consisted a CO2 10W laser and rotating mirror to create thermal markers on the water surface, and mid-wave infrared camera to trace their motion. The results confirm the turbulence production due to wave motion. The turbulent kinetic energy was found to be a function of time, wave steepness, wave phase, and initial turbulent conditions. Additionally, turbulent motion near the surface was found to be horizontally anisotropic due to the formation of near-surface eddies, elongated in the direction of wave propagation.