Transcript for:
Understanding Wave Dynamics and Refraction

so i've got a worksheet for you that i want you to see and we'll take a look at that worksheet and then we're also going to check the cams locally and i want to show you that's a little shake from oslo there i want to show you exactly what um the waves here look like and we can actually look at this refraction okay let's go all right so here's that worksheet i was talking about you could find this on canvas under uh in class worksheets although we're not in class anymore right um so this is kind of a recap just to get you your minds back on that okay so wave period is increasing here right and this is also showing here's this arrow saying increasing wind speed so this is how you create big waves right you increase the wind speed you increase the time and you increase the fetch the fetch is the distance in which the wind blows in one direction so with that you end up with increasing wave period as you increase all this wind speed duration and fetch right so 8 seconds all the way to 20 seconds your wavelength also increases from 100 meters say to 625 meters right and then your wave speed with all of that increases as well this is all out in deep water mind you because we know that shallow water waves are where their wave base is actually interacting with the sea floor we're here in deep water it's not touching the seafloor and if you look here this this changes the wave base as well so here's our orbital motion and here's the bottom of our wave base there's a 50 meter wave base when it has a 100 meter wavelength or 112 meter wave base when it's got a 225 meter wavelength notice it's one half the wavelength that our wave base would be so this is a really good recap diagram of everything we've talked about in waves so far now when it comes to wave refraction we're going to continue on right this is the type of stuff that i want you to be able to do so these here are our wave crests okay so these are the tops of the waves this is us in a helicopter looking down here's land where you'd set up shop to go hang out at the beach here's where the surfers would be out here and then here's deep water waves bending as you can see towards the coast the black line the dark black line here is the transition between land and ocean so this is that last bit of land before the ocean here's an island as well you can see that the waves actually wrap around this island and a story for you is i actually did a boat trip once from uh west timor back to bali in indonesia and i was on that boat trip for two weeks i was 18 at the time and i actually got to jump onto an island and i climbed up the top of this island um tallest peak it had and i could actually watch waves wrap around 360 degrees around the island just like this look here and then they would collide on one end so it does happen i wish i took video of that you know how technologically unsavvy i am with my flip phone i really wish that i did take advantage of that moment and have that video for you but maybe someday again you know so these dotted lines um are wave rays so wave rays are kind of telling you what direction the waves are going and the wave crests are just the waves themselves that you would feel and look at at the ocean right so this is kind of showing you it's bending those wave rays are bending the way you draw in the wave rays is that you draw a perpendicular so a 90 degree angle to all the wave crests so it kind of gives you an idea of how the waves are bending right bending towards the shore so in this case what you're going to want to do here is actually um be able to draw in your wave crests as well as your wave rays so i want to show you how to do that what we're going to do is use this little tool here okay so what we're going to use is use that tool and what i'll do is i'll show you an example here so here's the land right this is the transition between land and sea land being on the left hand side c being on the right hand side we're going to draw in our wave crests so here's our wave crests in blue they're not quite bending it but now they're starting to feel shallow water maybe this distance away so they're going to start slowing down there and this is going to start speeding up here what you're going to see is things start to bend right because this is slowing down this side is speeding up and they start looking more and more like the land and this is exactly how i would draw them now don't ever let them cross see i messed that up so i would come in here and erase this look at how savvy i am look at this wow anyway you draw in these wave crests and you get them right along the shoreline just like that right now uh how would you draw in your wave rays well we'll choose a a red or an orange line here and make it a lot smaller and what you could see is you draw in 90 degree angles to your wave crest so 90 degrees 90 degrees 90 degrees and you can see that those waves are kind of bending along and they're making their way towards the shoreline and they're going to mimic the shoreline okay now you're going to have to do this on a test or on a worksheet one day this worksheet in particular and uh something i want to show you on how another tactic to draw this would be using um let's make this a little thicker line again um you can actually start here so what you could do is draw in a wave that that starts near the coast you know that's going to mimic it pretty much so i'm going to draw in that one and what you could see is it would have already broken right here right so you can draw from the land back out to the original wave crest what you're going to see is it starts to bend less and less right so it bends less and less once again that's focusing in that energy you'd have kind of summertime beaches here winter time beaches out here in essence so yeah this is bending less and less spending less and less until you pretty much back to perfectly nice and straight okay so that's how you're gonna draw these in i hope that you get that and uh there's multiple ways that you can do that i'll try and draw in those uh wave cr wave rays again so here's a wave ray you come in and you could see that drawing 90 degrees to each line would make it bend like this there's that 90 degree angle there and there and there so these are focusing in on the headland if you were straight out you'd see from here it's just a perfectly straight line straight into it and then here it would actually bend towards the coast and bend towards the coast so those are your wave rings and those are your wave crests the blue wave rays being orange so go ahead and try these last two here and you will be tested on this so take your time if you got questions let me know and if you need help email me and i can help you verify your answers for you as well so let's get back into lecture now oh actually we're gonna go check the cams first so let's go do that okay so here we are at swami's again and what you can see is refraction occurring as we're watching this camera live so you can seeing waves coming in from this direction making their way in but once they hit this shallower part of the reef what they're doing is they're actually bending in this way right so they actually look like they're coming in from the south so they're coming in now look at this see this direction they're coming in this direction and they're bending back this way and once they hit the beach they look like they're coming from the south great so i hope you enjoyed the worksheet as well as the camera and you got a sense that refraction is occurring right on our coastline and from here i want to show you a couple more pictures of what refraction looks like so i hope you enjoyed this i i put this up because you know this is just uh my imagination running wild right i always look at really tiny waves and thinking about uh squirrels uh you know in those waves getting barreled and surfing and having fun and just trying to to to give you a laugh here that's really what i'm trying to do give you a laugh so hopefully you're laughing and enjoying this um another thing that we'll look at is uh these really tiny waves doing some refraction so let's take a look at this video and we'll talk about it okay okay so here are the inner workings of my mind right uh looking at squirrel waves so these are tiny waves totally unsurfable by me i can't ride these things but i can see that there's refraction occurring even in these tiny little waves if you look right along the shoreline here you can see them bending look at that moment right there let's pause it here you can see look at the bend of these waves you're watching this and you can actually see wow since all of the wave crests are squiggling like this this weird squiggle pattern you can actually see look there's actually shallow parts here deep parts here because the wave crest is moving in front then it gets shallow again then it gets deep again and then it gets shallow all the way up to the shore so you can actually look at this little lens of like a fisherman as well and think oh okay well if it's gonna be deep right here and shallow or no shallow here and deep here and here on either side that this deep bank right here might be where fish are hanging out so you can actually read the water right you got to read the surface of the ocean or a lake or an inlet or anything where waves are created which can be anywhere now if you continue this video you'll think about those squirrels riding these lefts down the beach right check this out check this part out look at the bend of all these waves look at that that's all refraction the squirrels are frothing they're out there riding these little tiny lefts or even ants just going getting towed in like larry hamilton because it's so big for him right so here's that another perfect example of wave refraction just on a very small scale but this does happen on larger ocean waves as well so there you go there you have it another way in which you can see refraction let's head back to lecture okay great so hopefully you really enjoyed that video and you got something from it and you can imagine uh being a squirrel and surfing those little tiny waves okay now let's take some more look at some more refraction uh style things so here we're in morocco and what i want you to notice is if you look way outside right all the waves are kind of paralleling themselves uh moving in a fashion from out where my arrow is now to straight in towards the beach right you can see it's just this they're angled in this way you can see wave front here a wave front here wave front here away front here right so all those waves are moving in parallel now as they move around the headland you can see they're hitting shallow water right but out here they're staying deep and as this shallow water along this this headland here creates these waves all this begins to bend around and it actually bends all the way back around into here and if you look at the waves here they're actually coming straight into the beach at the almost exact opposite angle as they were out here so out here waves are coming straight into the beach like this in here waves are coming straight into the beach like this yet if you were standing here on this side you'd think the waves are coming from this direction and if you were standing right here on the opposite side of the headland you'd think waves are coming in from way out over here that's because of refraction you can actually see the waves bend all the way around this situation now or this headland now something as a surfer that you look for are headlands like this and you're looking for waves to refract because oftentimes when waves refract waves get really clean the conditions get clean and waves get really good the more they refract often times the better they are okay they get a little smaller and lose a little bit of energy but oftentimes they get very clean when you see a wave bending like this you can see that look at that bend refraction really means to bend so you're seeing that bend there that's amazing it's amazing um then they can actually flip nearly 180 degrees right around the headland and that's how waves work so that's refraction