Nature of prevailing wind waves at the Southern Entrance of Khor Abdullah

Abstract EN

Wind is one of the major sources for generating water surface gravity waves.

Throughout Iraq, overall surface winds come from the northwest at 5-10 knots an average.

Three stations A,B and C were selected situated along the southern entrance of Khor ABDULLAH which extended to the distance 20 km.Wave estimation depends on the Sverdrup, Munk (1947) and Bretschneider (1952) method which is possible to be applied for computing the wind-sea significant wave height on a fully developed sea at storm area to the higher waves of greater importance in relation to their effect on ships or coastal structures, while beyond the storm area the swell wave height and swell period are computed by using Neumann and Pierson (1966) prediction method, the combined wave height is computed by using data of wind speed observed at 10 m over sea surface recorded at Abadan station in the north of Arabian Gulf.

The results shows that the higher wave height is around 1.7 m in summer season in the range of years 1990-2000,also the higher swell and combined waves are 1.3 m and 2.1 m respectively in summer in the same range of years in accordance with the field data.

The manner of increasing of the wind speed and wave height is parallel.

The slope of coast at these stations is shallow or flat.

The waves breakers occurs on coast are spilling.