Decomposing damped incident and reflected waves using correlation and quasi-linearization methods

Water waves propagating over a layer of soft mud or submerged aquatic vegetation can drastically attenuate over distances comparable to several wave lengths. The attenuation in the case of mud has been found previously to be reasonably described by an exponential decay. Waves reflect from beaches and any structures that they impact. The reflected waves affect wave heights measured in the field or laboratory wave basins. Decomposition of small amplitude waves into incident and reflected waves is a linear problem. However, the presence of the exponential damping introduces nonlinearity to the decomposition problem and requires an iterative process for solving the problem. Despite considerable experimental research on attenuation of waves over mud, none of the existing methods for decomposition of incident and reflected waves have accounted for this case.Here, the Newton Algorithm was used to account for the effect of wave decay over mud by quasi-linearizing the nonlinear equations. Also, a second method using a new error function and a commercial nonlinear solver was proposed in both time and frequency domain. The performance of both methods has been verified using artificial as well as laboratory data.