What factors affect the size and energy of waves? Wave height is affected by
wind speed, wind duration (or how long the wind blows), and fetch
, which is the distance over water that the wind blows in a single direction. If wind speed is slow, only small waves result, regardless of wind duration or fetch.
What factors affect the speed of a wave?
The speed of a wave is dependant on four factors:
wavelength, frequency, medium, and temperature
. Wave speed is calculated by multiplying the wavelength times the frequency (speed = l * f).
What factors of wind determine the size of a wave quizlet?
The factors that determine the size of a wave are…?
wind speed, fetch, and the length of the time the wind blows
.
What factors affect the speed of a wave quizlet?
The 3 factors that affect the speed of sound wave are
temperature,density, and stiffness of the medium that the wave travels through
.
How does wind affect wave energy?
So,
winds give waves energy
, and coastal bathymetry controls the general shape of breaking waves – but local winds also matter for wave-riding conditions. When winds blow onshore (from the ocean towards the land), they tend to create a choppy sea surface and also encourage waves to break before they become very steep.
Fetch is an important factor in the development of wind waves, which
increase in height with increasing fetch up to a maximum of 1,600 km (1,000 miles)
. Wave heights do not increase with increasing fetch beyond this distance.
Wave’ is a common term for a number of different ways in which energy is transferred:
In electromagnetic waves, energy is transferred through vibrations of electric and magnetic fields
. In sound waves, energy is transferred through vibration of air particles or particles of a solid through which the sound travels.
The medium does not make the wave
. The particles in a medium become disturbed and pass on this disturbance to the next one, and so on. So, the disturbance caused by the particles can travel through a medium such as air, ocean water, land, violin strings, Slinky coils, etc.
Three factors affect the growth of wind waves.
Wind must be moving faster than the wave crests for energy transfer from air to sea to continue
, so the mean speed of the wind, or wind strength, is clearly important to wind wave development. A second factor is the length of time the wind blows, or wind duration.
Wave heights increase as all three factors increase:
The greater the wind speed, the larger the wave heights. The longer the duration, the larger the wave heights. The longer the fetch, the larger the wave heights.
The wavelength of a wave does not affect the speed at which the wave travels
. Both Wave C and Wave D travel at the same speed. The speed of a wave is only altered by alterations in the properties of the medium through which it travels.
At first, the wind makes only small ripples on the water.
As the wind continues the waves grow larger
. The longer the wind blows, the larger the waves become. Waves form when energy is transferred from the air to the water.
Fetch is an important characteristic of open water because
longer fetch can result in larger wind-generated waves
. The larger waves, in turn, can increase shoreline erosion and sediment resuspension.
Fetch length, along with the wind speed (wind strength), and duration,
determines the size (sea state) of waves produced
. If the wind direction is constant, the longer the fetch and the greater the wind speed, the more wind energy is transferred to the water surface and the larger the resulting sea state will be.
Because deep-water waves do not interact with the ocean bottom as they travel, their speed is independent of the water depth. But as waves enter shallow water, interaction with the bottom alters the waves.
Wave speed decreases, wavelength shortens and wave height increases
.
The record-breaking wave was surfed by the 37-year-old on 29 October 2020 at the
Praia do Norte beach in Nazaré, Portugal
. The wave was a humungous 26.2 metres – taking the previous record away from Brazilian Rodrigo Koxa, who surfed a 24.4-metre wave on 8 November 2017.
The energy of the wave depends on both the amplitude and the frequency
. If the energy of each wavelength is considered to be a discrete packet of energy, a high-frequency wave will deliver more of these packets per unit time than a low-frequency wave.
Energy of radiation is
inversely proportional
to its wavelength. That is, when the wavelength increases, energy decreases and when the wavelength decreases, energy increases.
Just as wavelength and frequency are related to light, they are also related to energy.
The shorter the wavelengths and higher the frequency corresponds with greater energy
. So the longer the wavelengths and lower the frequency results in lower energy. The energy equation is E = hν.
