Shear Stresses and Mean Flow in Shoaling and Breaking Waves

Abstract

We investigate the vertical, wave averaged distributions of shear stresses and Eulerian flow in normally incident, shoaling and breaking waves. It is found that shear stresses are solely due to wave amplitude variations, which can be caused by shoaling, boundary layer dissipation and/or breaking wave dissipation. The resulting shear stress and mean flow distributions for these cases are derived, and compared with earlier work.