An experimental study of two-dimensional surface water waves propagating on depth-varying currents. Part 1. Regular waves

This paper describes an experimental study of two-dimensional surface water waves propagating on a depth-varying current with a non-uniform vorticity distribution. The investigation is divided into two parts. The first concer ns the 'equilibrium' conditions in which the oscillatory wave motion and th e current co-exist. Measurements of the water-surface elevation, the water- particle kinematics, and the near-bed pressure fluctuations are compared to a number of wave and wave-current solutions including a nonlinear model ca pable of incorporating the vertical structure of the current profile. These comparisons confirm that the near-surface vorticity leads to an important modification of the dispersion equation, and thus affects the nature of the wave-induced orbital motion over the entire water depth. However, the incl usion of vorticity dependent terms within the dispersion equation is not su fficient to define the combined wave-current flow. The present results sugg est that vorticity may lead to a significant change in the water-surface pr ofile. If a current is positively sheared, dU/dz > 0, with negative vortici ty at the water surface, as would be the case in a wind-driven current, a w ave propagating in the same direction as the current will experience increa sed crest-trough asymmetry due to the vorticity distribution. With higher a nd sharper wave crests there is a corresponding increase in both the maximu m water-particle accelerations and the maximum horizontal water-particle ve locities. These results are consistent with previous theoretical calculatio ns involving uniform vorticity distributions (Simmen & Saffman 1985 and Tel es da Silva & Peregrine 1988). The second part of the study addresses the 'gradually varying' problem in w hich there are changes in the current, the wavelength and the wave height d ue to the initial interaction between the wave and the current. These data show that there is a large and non-uniform change in the current profile th at is dependent upon both the steepness of the waves and the vorticity dist ribution. Furthermore, comparisons between the measured wave height change and a number of solutions based on the conservation of wave action, confirm that the vorticity distribution plays a dominant role. In the absence of a conservation equation for wave action appropriate for nonlinear waves on a depth-varying current, an alternative approach based on the conservation o f total energy flux, first proposed by Longuet-Higgins & Stewart (1960), is shown to be in good agreement with the measured data.