Percolating transition in wind-induced water wave

Wei Shuo Lo^1*, Ji Lin Jou¹, Lin I¹

¹Physics, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan

* Presenter:Wei Shuo Lo, email:loweishuo@gmail.com

Under strong wind, wave turbulence exhibiting spatiotemporal fluctuations over a wide range of scales can be excited on the water surface. The turbulent water surface waves take space to develop through the interplay between turbulent wind and the fluctuating water surface. Through direct visualization, rich spatiotemporal dynamical behaviors of nonlinear waves can be explored. However, the transition scenario to strong wave turbulence and the associated waveform dynamics, especially for the percolating transition remain elusive. In this work, through wavelet transform, hot and cold turbulent sites (HTSs and CTSs, respectively) in the 1+1D spatiotemporal (y-t) space (y, normal to a wave propagating direction) are identified. It is found that, with increasing fetch (x, the distance from the wind entrance), the transition from the weakly to the strongly turbulent state is associated with the sporadic emergence of HTSs in the form of power-law size distributed clusters, followed by the formation of a large HTSs cluster percolating through the entire y-t space. The scaling exponents around the critical point are also similar to those found in the theoretical predictions and experimental studies of directed percolating transition to hydrodynamic turbulence

Keywords: percolation, wave turbulence, wind-induced water surface wave