Intermittency of wind wave group breaking

Knowledge on intermittency of wave breaking is so far limited to a few summary statistics, while the probability distribution of time interval between breaking events can provide a full view of intermittency. Based on a series of experiments on wind wave breaking, such probability distributions are investigated. Breaking waves within a wave group were taken as a single breaking event according to recent studies. Interval between successive wave groups with breaker is the focus of this paper. For intervals in our experiments with different fetch and wind conditions, their distributions are all skewed and weighted on small intervals. Results of Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests on time series of these intervals indicate that they all follow gamma distribution, and some are even exponential type. Average breaking-group-interval decreases with friction velocity and significant steepness until the wind is strong enough; most of them are more than 10 times the dominant wave period. Group breaking probability proposed by Babanin recently and the average number of breaking waves in wave groups are also discussed, and they are seemingly more reasonable and sensitive than traditional breaking probability defined in terms of single wave.