| Abstract: | The attenuation of wave energy by submerged or near-emergent coastal vegetation is one of the prominent methods of energy dissipation in areas with significant presence of wetlands. In this thesis, the nature of this dissipation in nearshore random wave fields is investigated using a parabolic frequency-domain nonlinear wave model, modified to incorporate different mechanisms which represent energy dissipation by the vegetation. The nonlinear wave model with the various dissipations mechanisms is tested against data, and the performance evaluated. Two individual dissipation descriptions which give different importance to the effect of vegetation motion on the damping are studied and the model results are compared with available data in literature to determine the importance of plant stem sway. We then further show the effect of vegetation-induced damping on non-linear wave-wave interactions via bi-coherence analysis. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/152746 |
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