Observing eddy dye patches induced by shear instabilities in the surf zone on a plane beach

Abstract

The effects of surf zone eddy generated by alongshore currents on the deformation and transport of dye are still poorly understood, and related tracer release experiments are lacking. Therefore, a tracer release laboratory experiment was conducted under monochromatic, unidirectional incident waves with a large incident angle (30°) on a plane beach with a 1:100 slope in a large wave basin. A charge-coupled device suspended above the basin recorded the dye patch image. The evolution of eddy dye patch was observed and the transport and diffusion were analyzed based on the collected images. Subsequently, a linear instability numerical model was adopted to calculate the perturbation velocity field at the initial stage. The observation and image processing results show that surf zone eddy patches occurred and were separated from the original dye patches. Our numerical analysis results demonstrate that the structure of the perturbation velocity field is consistent with the experimental observations, and that the ejection of eddy patches shoreward or offshore may be ascribed to the double vortex.