Coastal wave forecasting over large spatial scales is essential for many applications (e.g., coastal safety assessments, coastal management and developments, etc.). This demand explains the necessity for accurate yet effective models. A well-known efficient modelling approach is the quadratic approach (often referred to as frequency-domain models, nonlinear mild-slope models, amplitude models, etc.). The efficiency of this approach stems from a significant modelling reduction of the original governing equations (e.g., Euler equations). Most significantly, the description of wave nonlinearity essentially collapses into a single mode coupling term determined by the quadratic interaction coefficients. As a result, it is expected that the efficiency achieved by the quadratic approach is accompanied by a decrease in prediction accuracy. In order to gain further insight into the predictive capabilities of this modelling approach, this study examines six different quadratic formulations, three of which are of the Boussinesq type and the other three are referred to as fully dispersive. It is found that while the Boussinesq formulations reliably predict the evolution of coastal waves, the predictions by the fully dispersive formulations tend to be affected by false developments of modulational instability. Consequently, the predicted wave fields by the fully dispersive formulations are characterized by unexpectedly strong modulations of the sea-swell part and associated unexpected infragravity response. The impact of the modulational instability on wave prediction based on the quadratic approach is further demonstrated using existing laboratory results of bichromatic and irregular wave conditions.

Spectral information of coastal waves and the associated statistical parameters (e.g., the significant wave height and mean wave period) over large spatial scales is essential for many applications (e.g., coastal safety assessments, coastal management and developments, etc.). This demand explains the necessity for accurate yet effective models. A well-known efficient modelling approach is the quadratic approach (often referred to as frequency-domain models, weakly nonlinear mild-slope models, amplitude models, etc.). The efficiency of this approach is achieved through modelling reduction of the original governing equations (e.g., Euler equations). Most significantly, wave nonlinearity is described solely by a single quadratic mode-coupling term. Therefore, doubts arise with regard to the predictive capabilities of the quadratic approach to reliably describe the nonlinear development of waves in the coastal environment where nonlinearity is typically significant. This study attempts to push the limit of the prediction capabilities of nonlinear coastal waves based on the quadratic approach. To this end, an optimization process is proposed, striving to extract the quadratic formulation which describes most adequately nonlinear wave developments over water depths and bathymetrical structures which characterize the coastal environment. The outcome is the model QuadWave1D: a fully dispersive quadratic model for coastal wave prediction in one-dimension. Based on a wide set of examples (including monochromatic, bichromatic and irregular wave conditions) and comparing to other representative quadratic formulations, it is found that QuadWave1D presents superior predictive capabilities of both the sea-swell components and the infragravity field.

In shallow water, the spectral evolution associated with energy transfers due to three-wave (or triad) interactions is important for the prediction of nearshore wave propagation and wave-driven dynamics. The numerical evaluation of these nonlinear interactions involves the evaluation of a weighted convolution integral in both frequency and directional space for each frequency-direction component in the wave field. For reasons of efficiency, operational wave models often rely on a so-called collinear approximation that assumes that energy is only exchanged between wave components travelling in the same direction (collinear propagation) to eliminate the directional convolution. In this work, we show that the collinear approximation as presently implemented in operational models is inconsistent. This causes energy transfers to become unbounded in the limit of unidirectional waves (narrow aperture), and results in the underestimation of energy transfers in short-crested wave conditions. We propose a modification to the collinear approximation to remove this inconsistency and to make it physically more realistic. Through comparison with laboratory observations and results from Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed modified collinear model is consistent, remains bounded, smoothly converges to the unidirectional limit, and is numerically more robust. Our results show that the modifications proposed here result in a consistent collinear approximation, which remains bounded and can provide an efficient approximation to model nonlinear triad effects in operational wave models.