Energy dissipation in waves breaking on gentle slopes

The flow field of waves breaking on a gently sloping beach is shown to closely resemble that of hydraulic jumps. This supports the use of the hydraulic jump formulation for the breaking wave energy dissipation. A correction to this formulation, which takes into account the effects of turbulent flow, is found to explain the observed discrepancies between the classical theoretical result and the experiments satisfactorily. These findings are used to propose a simple, semi-empirical model for the wave height decay which includes the set-up. The model is generalized to a wider range of wave conditions by analyzing published data.