Wavelet bicoherence analysis of wind–wave interaction

A new technique in the analysis of wind–wave interaction, wavelet bicoherence, will be applied in this article. Wavelet bicohence has the ability to detect phase coupling and nonlinear interactions of the quadratic order with time resolution. It is used in this study to analyze wind–wave interaction during wave growth in a Mistral event. A selected record of simultaneously measured wind and wave data during Mistral is divided into five segments and the computations of the wavelet bicoherence are conducted for the whole record and for all divided segments. The results show that the phase coupling occurs between wind speed and wave height over a certain range of frequencies and that the range is different from one segment to another due to the non-stationary feature of the time series.