MODELING THE OPTICAL SIGNATURE INDUCED BY WAVE BREAKING USING A BOUSSINESQ MODEL

Bubbles and foam generated by breaking waves are primary surface signatures that have profound effects on remote sensing applications. Recent studies showed that wave breaking-induced bubbles and foam significantly increase LiDAR backscatter and affect LiDAR data processing, reducing the accuracy of airborne LiDAR measurements(Wang et al., 2022). Over the past several decades, significant efforts have been made to improve the understanding of wave-breaking mechanisms and their connection to optical signatures, such as bubbles and foam, in both the deep ocean and the nearshore field(e.g., Reul and Chapron, 2003, Carini et al., 2015). In this study, we pro- posed to develop a surface signature component in the phase-resolving wave model, FUNWAVE- TVD. FUNWAVE-TVD is a depth-integrated two- dimensional model for modeling wave propagation, breaking, and wave runup in a nearshore domain.