Eduardo Monsalve (FAST) - Ocean waves in the lab: coastal hydrodynamics and inertial waves

The ocean, being the most ubiquitous fluid volume on Earth, is of paramount importance for science. In this context, the scale modeling of natural phenomena becomes important when trying to isolate physical behaviors hidden in the environment.  In the first part, I will present the experimental study of the coastal dynamics of a sandy beach under the incidence of regular waves. The interest of this work lies in achieving a parametric analysis of the morphodynamics of the beach as a function of the coupling between incident waves and the natural swash movement after breaking. Under certain conditions, the appearance of a "backwash" vortex facilitates the formation of strong depth steps and longer swash zones, which in turn, can produce critical coupling generating high absorption spontaneously.  In the second part, I will present the study of the generation of wave turbulence in a rotating fluid experiment. Special roughness in the boundary conditions have suppressed geostrophic modes, ubiquitous in rotating fluids. Thus, most of the energy is carried by "pure" inertial waves. Moreover, a geometry that allows wave-wave interactions to occur on a scale much smaller than the size of the experiment has allowed the long-sought goal of measuring the theoretical turbulent spectrum quantitatively and unambiguously.