Fourth Order Lagrangian solutions for passive tracers in regular waves

Hey all,

We finally managed to do a proper write-up on my wise presentation and submit to JFM. A preprint may be found here: Link.

The basic question I had after looking at hurricane data from our Spotter drifters was- is there ever a need to correct for the fact that Spotters are Lagrangian- and I ended up taking it to the fourth order.

To not bury the lede- in intermediate water at finite Ursell numbers we may need to take some care- especially for the nonlinear statistics.

We also found that wave heights are always the same for regular waves across reference frames- which in hindsight is obvious- but the relation between crest/through amplitudes being different in different references frames may be of some interest.

Nothing earth shattering (apart from a lot of painful algebra) - but a cute little exersize in perturbation analysis nonetheless. The code is available on github (and as a python package) for those interested!

Cheers

Pieter

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