SWAN fysica plus

Describes the results of the project 'SWAN fysica plus'. Existing formulations of some dominant processes in coastal regions have been either investigated, validated or improved for application in the wave prediction model SWAN. The aim of the research was improving the prediction of the wave height and wave period near to the coastline. The dominant processes that have been investigated, were depth-induced wave breaking, three (triads) and four (quadruplets) wave-wave interactions and whitecapping. Three alternatives for the breaker formulation have been validated and an alternative formulation for white-capping has also been proposed and validated. A phenomenogical study has been carried out to find out under which circumstances triads are important in nature, and in SWAN in particular. An extensive study on quadruplets resulted in a number of usful formulations ranging from accurate and expensive in computational time, to less accurate but suitable for application in numerical models, such as SWAN.