Effects of turbulence in high-speed winds on wind-wave coupled simulations

The impacts of climate-driven hazards in coastal regions escalate due to sea level rise and anthropogenic warming, causing severe direct losses and fatalities. To enhance the resilience of communities to extreme events, the NICHE team aims to design a full-scale testing infrastructure to model the impacts of wind and coastal hazards. The design will rely on physical experiments in existing wind-wave facilities, as well as numerical simulations.

This talk will present progress towards establishing validated high-fidelity large-eddy simulations (LES) of coupled wind-wave problems to inform the design of NICHE. We investigate the consequence of using different interface capturing schemes on the turbulence characteristics of both the wind and water velocity field. Moreover, we compare the results of LES with different subgrid models, and Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes simulations with different turbulence models. Finally, the effects of turbulence in high-speed winds on the wave propagation, wave morphology and wave breakup event are quantified.