Phase Spectral Composition of Wind Generated Ocean Surface Waves

Abstract

A study of the composition of the phase spectra of wind generated ocean surface waves is carried out using wave records collected employing a ship borne wave recorder. It is found that the raw phase spectral estimates could be fitted by the Uniform probability distribution in all cases with widely varying confidence levels. Gaussian fits are found suitable with varying confidence levels for smoothed phase spectra for narrow and wide band variance spectra except when the spectra are well differentiated into 2 wave systems with a dominating local sea. For this type of sea states, a directional tuning in the directional phase spectra could be expected. A new spectra width parameter which is equally applicable to spectra of narrow band, wide band and multipeaked nature is also defined.