NEARSHORE CIRCULATIONS ON A WAVY COAST

Abstract

Nearshore circulations, produced by wave-induced radiation stress gradients, form different circulation patterns under different wave characteristics and topographical conditions. Although numerous studies of nearshore circulations, such as Bowen (1969), Miller and Barcilon (1978), Dalrymple & Lozano (1978) and so on, have been appeared in the literature, it seems that little attention is paid on the case of a non-straight shoreline. O'Rorske & Leblond (1972) have investigated the wave-induced longshore currents in a semicircular bay, while Oda (1982) has used the coordinate transformation to treat nearshore circulations on a circular-arc shaped coast. Lin and Lee (1982), introduced a small perturbation quantity of wave set-up and set-down, induced by the non-straight shoreline, into the mean total water depth to obtain a governing partial differential equation by which they investigated the nearshore circulations on a cuspate coast. In Lin and Liou (1986), a more general equation was deduced on the orthogonal curvlinear coordinate system to unify the diversities among the related theories, and moreover, to investigate the nearshore circulations on the arc-shaped coast.