Direct Measurements of Temporal Wave Field Evolution in a Laboratory Tank and Comparison with Strongly Nonlinear Simulations

The evolution along a tank of unidirectional nonlinear wave groups with narrow spectrum previously studied in [1] is compared with numerical simulations based on weakly, strongly and fully nonlinear models. Measurements of the instantaneous surface elevation within the laboratory tank were carried out using digital processing of video-recorded sequences of images of the contact line movement at the tank side wall. Records of the measured surface displacements variation were obtained along the entire tank at different instants. The accumulated set of experimental data enables to compare directly the experimental data with the results of numerical simulations based on conventional numerical models which describe wave field evolution in time.