Wind Wave Growth and Dissipation in a Narrow, Fetch-Limited Estuary: Long Island Sound
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper investigates the effect of basin geometry on wind-wave growth using extensive model calculations. The paper has the potential to be published but currently it is raw. The paper structure, figures presentations, and the text of the manuscript have to be improved. The paper needs major revision for it to be readable. I stress that the paper includes interesting results which should be presented accurately and clearly.
1. This paper considers the effect of basin geometry on wind-wave growth, first reported by Kahma and Pettersson (1993). However, the authors did not mention Kahma and Pettersson in the text. Data from Kahma and Pettersson are shown in Figure 7, but the manuscript includes no discussion of them.
2. The usual structure of the paper is violated. Introduction in traditional form is absent. A review of preceding research and a description of this paper's novelty is absent. The objective of the paper is not formulated. Discussion of results is absent. In Conclusions, the results of the work are unclear.
3. On the methodology of the paper: The authors used a hydrodynamic model coupled with a wave model. But the advantage of this approach in comparison with the use of only wave models is not highlighted. The results of hydrodynamic modeling are not mentioned.
4. The authors considered the effects of several mechanisms of wave energy dissipation. But the refraction caused by tidal currents is not considered. How do the results change after switching off the hydrodynamic modeling (switching off tidal currents)? Mengual et al. (2022) reported a considerable effect of tidal currents on waves in estuaries.
5. Figure 4: Why are two different vertical axes in the Figure? What do markers mean? Why is the curve for CLIS original forcing not shown? Why one of the curves is strange and sharply grows after 16:00? Discussion of some curves of Figure 4 is absent in the manuscript. I note also, Dulov et al. (2020) proposed an equation to evaluate the time of wave growth should stop (see page 3, an equation after eq. (14)). That equation gives that “the wave energy saturation” should be after 2 hours for 10 km fetch and 12 m/s wind velocity, as in your paper.
6. Figure 5: What does mean “over one wave period” in the figure caption? The substantial drawback of this figure is that the reader cannot see the distributions of significant wave height (or wave energy) and frequency (or period) of spectral peak. I recommend adding these distributions. Also, adding of dissipation rate without tidal currents will complete this figure.
7. Figure 7: The current version of Figure 7 is not readable. I recommend enlarging the plates. Another way is to use two different plates for experimental and model data. It will result in four plates in the figure. Data from Kahma and Pettersson (1993) should be discussed in the text. It is unclear from the text how model points were obtained. Do they belong to saturated waves? Are they taken at two locations (WLIS and CLIS) under different wind velocities? Why do we see point clouds rather than curves? These issues must be clarified.
8. Tables 4 and 5: What do m, r, c mean? Please correct units for the wave period.
9. Equation (21): Replace <x> with <X> in the first bracket in the denominator.
10. L 274-284: What data were used for Cds optimization, from WLIS or CLIS?
11. L294-296: Why are these two sentences? How do they relate to the preceding? I recommend deleting both.
12. L360-362, “The nonlinear interactions transfer wave energy to less dispersive frequencies and are, therefore, important for wave field energy growth.”: Maybe, “dispersive’ should be replaced with “dissipative”? This mistake encounters several times in the text. Please correct all.
References
Kahma K., Pettersson H. Influence of the fetch geometry on wave growth. In “Proceedings of the Symposiun on The air-sea interface, radio and acoustic sensing, turbulence and wave dynamics”, Eds. M.A. Donelan, W.H. Hui, W.J, Plant; Marseilles, France, 24-30 June 1993. P. 91-96.
Baptiste Mengual, Xavier Bertin, Florian Place, Marc Pezerat, Thibault Coulombier, Diogo Mendes, André Bustorff Fortunato, Wave-current interactions at the Tagus Estuary Mouth (Portugal) under storm wave conditions, Ocean Modelling, 2022, 102035, doi: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2022.102035.
Dulov, V.; Kudryavtsev, V.; Skiba, E. On fetch- and duration-limited wind wave growth: Data and parametric model. Ocean Modelling. 2020, 153, 101676:1–101676:9, doi: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2020.101676
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
I would like to express my gratitude to you for your valuable feedback, which has significantly contributed to the improvement of the manuscript. We have carefully addressed each comment and suggestion, making appropriate revisions to enhance the clarity and quality of our work.
Best,
Amin Ilia
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The article titled "Wave Growth and Dissipation in a Fetch-Limited Urban Estuary: Long Island Sound" explores issues related to the transformation of wind wave fields in a protected water area. There is a comment about the title. The word "urban” seems unnecessary and out of place as it does not appear further in the article. Some areas in the article require further clarification.
1. Object of the study. The article could greatly benefit from a small geographic description, including the dimensions and the topography of the surrounding land, as they are scattered throughout the text. To enhance comprehension, the abbreviations used in Figure 1 should be clarified and explained earlier in the article.
2. At 150 km long, and up to 30 km wide, the bay is examined for «several types of storm conditions: easterlies, westerlies, easterly to westerly, and westerly to easterly». The above types form a wave at the largest fetch length (150 km). However, even at 30 km significant waves can be formed. Therefore, the very formulation of the question seems artificial.
3. Line 58. "We use the model to examine why observed significant wave heights during wind events from the northeast are lower at the Western LIS (WLIS) station than at the Central LIS (CLIS) station, even though the fetch length for winds from this direction is greater than double at the WLIS station." This is hardly always the case. Apparently, there are simply conditions for such a situation. Instead of rigidly focusing on the fetch length as the primary cause of differences in the significant wave heights, the authors should consider other factors, such as the stability of the air current. A wind of strictly the same direction over 150 km is probably possible in the open ocean at the periphery of a giant cyclone. However, in our case, there may be other conditions for the observed difference in significant wave heights.
4. The article should provide information about the periods of operation of the instruments used in the study and specifying which of these periods have been utilized.
5. In the Wind Field Modification section (3), the authors justify the use of correction factors for wind speed based on meteorological observations from platforms located in estuarine waters. According to them, the reanalysis data underestimates wind information significantly. However, it is necessary to determine whether these sensors are placed at the same height (i.e., 10 m) as the sensors used in the reanalysis models. Additionally, the directions of the corrected wind speeds should be taken into account since they may differ substantially from those obtained in synoptic situations and depend on parameters such as the size and depth of the cyclone. It would also be useful to clarify how the adapted wind field fragment integrates with the rest of the data. Are all wind fields multiplied by correction factors? Do the WRF-NAPR points with a spatial resolution of 9 and 32 km match the EXRX-ARTG observation points?
6. It is unclear why a combined wave-current model was used when only the wave aspect was studied. In addition, there is no information that the wave unit directly takes into account the fields of currents.
7. Figure 7 shows good correction results for the wind data. It indicates regressions of the wave heights measured at the WLIS station with the model data, but it is unclear over what period of time the data was collected. It would also be beneficial to examine data from the CLIS station. Additionally, it is not clear from Figure 7 which model parameters were used. The coefficients determining wave growth and whitecapping appear to be taken by default, even though the article devotes a whole section to adjusting these coefficients, which is one of the main tasks of the work. It raises the question about the necessity of adjusting these coefficients, since the results appear acceptable without this setting.
8. Line 298 states that «During all simulations, triad nonlinear wave-wave interactions were on, and the quadruplet nonlinear wave-wave interactions were solved using default DIA coefficients». It should be noted that in shallow water, triad nonlinear wave-wave interactions can result in the formation of additional peaks. Generally, the inclusion of triad-wave interaction in combination with quadruplet-wave interaction can lead to instability and unphysical solution.
9. The purpose of including and excluding different wave mechanisms in Figure 4 is unclear. It follows from the figure that the wave in the west is higher than in the center. It is also unclear how this correlates with comment 3.
10. Line 392. «Equations 7&8 indicate the wave energy generated 60° away from the wind direction is equal to half of the wave energy generated along the wind direction. » In fact, it is a case of the interaction between the wave and wind fields.
11. Line 399. «When all the energy in the storm is accumulated, the energy input into the central region can be greater than that in the west. » This statement seems controversial, since it implies that more directions result in more energy.
12. In Figure 6, usually, such graphs are oriented with "0" at the top, and counting is done clockwise.
13. It is unclear what "n" represents in tables like Table 4 or Table 5. Does it indicate the number of terms or the number of hours? Further clarification is needed as it turns out that we are talking about periods of about a week, which seems too short.
Conclusion: Overall, the article is quite extensive. It could be more interesting and compelling by incorporating information about the area's climatic conditions. Based on the experience gained from this research, this could potentially become a topic for future studies.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
I would like to express my gratitude to you for your valuable feedback, which has significantly contributed to the improvement of the manuscript. We have carefully addressed each comment and suggestion, making appropriate revisions to enhance the clarity and quality of our work. Please find attached our response to your comments.
Best,
Amin Ilia
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors! your article is interesting for experts in wave modeling. You are considering an interesting bay and you have a good observational data. Unfortunately, the obtained results most likely contain an error. You need to redo the calculations of the wave parameters taking into account my comments. The article cannot be published in the presented form. But I think you will find mistakes and resubmit the article.
1. It is necessary to rewrite the abstract, briefly the relevance of the topic, the motivation of the study. briefly used methods and the most striking results. For example "We found the wave model results in LIS were highly dependent on wave model growth and dissipation parameters" this is trivial.
2. The introduction Part should be completely rewritten. First you need to describe the problem, the relevance of the topic, why your studies are being done. Next is a review of works devoted to wave modeling in LIS and an overview of works which used unstructured grids for other Gulfs with similar size, there are many such works. Next, the review of the study of other hydrometeorological characteristics of LIS.
3. You cannot use empty boundary conditions for the wave model. Waves from the Atlantic Ocean freely reach the New Shoreham island. Then part of the energy goes around the island and come to LIS, diffraction and dissipationoccurs, but you need to calculate it. Please recalculate wave part with correct boundary conditions.
4. It is necessary to present the 1d spectra by buoy and by model (with default parameters). Then it will be immediately visible that there is an incoming wave with a period of 7-9 seconds and a height of 0.3-0.4 m. (this swell is shown in your work Shin et al., 2021. Your errors in Figure 3a can be explained by this spectra.
Most likely, due to the lack of spectra at the open boundary, you got a discrepancy between the model and the buoy data by 0.3 m. But this is not a reason to change the pumping and dissipation coefficients.
5. The article is called ....Urban Estuary" . But there is nothing about "ship waves" in the article. If shipping is intensive, then the influence of ship waves can be seen on the data of wave buoys, maybe this is also a source of errors. Please add estimates of possible height of "ship waves".
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
I would like to express my gratitude to you for your valuable feedback, which has significantly contributed to the improvement of the manuscript. We have carefully addressed each comment and suggestion, making appropriate revisions to enhance the clarity and quality of our work. Please find attached our response to your comments.
Best,
Amin Ilia
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors made additional calculations and improved the manuscript. I recommend minor revisions to eliminate technical mistakes:
1. Figure 4 again has two different axes of Hs. One of them must be deleted.
2. Please permute numbering of Figures 6 and 7 to agree with the text in Lines 467-496.
3. Line 498 and further: please change Figure 7 => Figure 8, Figure 8 => Figure 9.
4. Line 640: pf => of
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for taking the time to review our manuscript. Your valuable feedback has greatly enhanced the quality of the paper. We have made the necessary revisions to address the remaining issues you pointed out.
Best,
Amin Ilia
Reviewer 3 Report
I am very sorry, but the authors have not made significant corrections, only cosmetic. therefore, I am forced to reject the article definitively
In additional:
Please note, that Significant wave height (hs) it is an integral of energegy by all measured frequencies. It is mean that swell and ship waves included in buoy Hs. In your model results it is no swell and no ship waves.
In attach you can see swell in WLIS station with 10-15 sec period (from Shin et all 2021). It has Hs 0.2-0.3 m, like your model error. Please, think about it directly.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for taking the time to review our manuscript. I apologize for missing Figure 4b in Shin et al.'s (2021) paper. We have made the necessary modifications to the manuscript to address this issue. Please note that spectral wave models are not appropriate for studying wave diffraction, especially in the case of swell waves. Furthermore, we have revised the title of the paper to emphasize that our study focuses explicitly on wind waves. I appreciate your feedback and hope that the revised article captures your interest.
Best,
Amin Ilia
Round 3
Reviewer 3 Report
Hs calculated from your buoy measurements in any way include Swell and ship waves
where m0, the zeroth-moment of the variance spectrum, is obtained by integration of the variance spectrum
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for dedicating your time to reviewing this manuscript. In response to your comment, we have incorporated a new section (Section 7) in the paper, focusing on the examination of the feasibility of swell waves in Central and Western Long Island Sound through the implementation of the Goda 1978 method. Furthermore, we have included a new set of observations to provide additional confirmation.
I wish to emphasize that our study remains robust despite the absence of explicit consideration of swell waves. As elaborated in section 7, the neglect of swell waves does not introduce any significant errors in our findings. Furthermore, I would like to clarify that ship waves are beyond the scope of this study. Also, ship navigations are usually minimum during storm events. Therefore, the impact of ship waves on this study is minimal as the focus of this study is storm events.
Thank you once again for your valuable input.
Best regards,
Amin Ilia
