Masters Thesis Defense: Zachary Taebel

The Masters Thesis Defense of Zack Taebel is presented by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences. This event will be held on Friday, September 10th at 3:30 pm. This event will be held in person and will also be streamed online. The physical location of the event is UNC-HC campus, Venable/Murray Hall, 3rd floor conference room 3204. To watch online join via Zoom Meeting ID 263 571 2762.

Title: Investigation of the Dual Cascade of Wave Turbulence in an Idealized Real-World System

Abstract: The statistical treatment of random weakly nonlinear waves, termed Wave Turbulence (WT), has been a focal point of study for oceanography since Zakharov showed the classical water wave problem could be cast in a Hamiltonian framework. For ocean gravity waves, WT predicts the simultaneous cascades of two conserved quantities, energy and wave action, in opposite directions, which yield power laws for the energy spectra. Despite these power laws being derived over half a century ago, their validity in real world systems is subject to debate. Part of this uncertainty rests in the assumptions of an idealized system required for the derivations of these power laws. Justifying the utility of WT as an approximation of the dynamics of ocean waves requires proving its accuracy in a real world manifestation of the idealized system in WT theory. Here we present early results of the attempted production of the dual cascade of WT in an idealized wavefield at the FloWave Research Facility. While we did see evidence of a direct cascade of energy, we did not observe an inverse cascade of wave action. As this is an ongoing experiment, we explain future steps towards a successful observation of the dual cascade, motivated by the results we have obtained thus far.