Generation of intermediately long sea waves by weakly sheared winds

The present study is concerned with the numerical modeling of sea-wave instability under the effect of logarithmic-wind profile in hurricane conditions. The central point of the study is the calculation of the wave growth rate, which is proportional to the fractional input energy from the weakly sheared (logarithmic) wind to the wave exponentially varying with time. It is shown for hurricane conditions that the Miles-type stability model based on the Charnock’s formula with the standard constant coefficient underestimates the growth rate ∼5–50 times as compared with the model that employs the roughness adopted from the experimental data for hurricane winds. The drag reduction with wind speed at hurricane conditions coupled with the similar behavior of the dimensionless gravity acceleration leads to the minimum in the maximal growth rate and the maximum in the most unstable wavelength.