This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Waves and shallow water" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Whenwaves travel into areas ofshallow water, they begin to be affected by theocean bottom.^[1] The freeorbital motion of the water is disrupted, and water particles in orbital motion no longer return to their original position. As the water becomes shallower, the swell becomes higher and steeper, ultimately assuming the familiar sharp-crested wave shape. After thewave breaks, it becomes a wave of translation and erosion of the ocean bottom intensifies.

Cnoidal waves are exact periodic solutions to theKorteweg–de Vries equation in shallow water, that is, when the wavelength of the wave is much greater than the depth of the water.

• Ballantine scale – Marine biology measurement scale
• Boussinesq approximation (water waves) – Approximation valid for weakly non-linear and fairly long waves
• Mild-slope equation – Physics phenomenon and formula
• Shallow water equations – Set of partial differential equations on fluid flow
• Stokes drift – Average velocity of a fluid parcel in a gravity wave
• Undertow (water waves) – Return flow below nearshore water waves
• Ursell number – Dimensionless number describing nonlinearity of long surface gravity waves on a fluid layer
• Wave shoaling – Effect by which surface waves entering shallower water change in wave height

• Exploring the World Ocean
• The OceansArchived 2016-03-03 at theWayback Machine

Thisoceanography article is astub. You can help Wikipedia byexpanding it.

• v
• t
• e

• Water waves
• Oceanography stubs
• Water

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Articles needing additional references from January 2024
• All articles needing additional references
• Webarchive template wayback links
• All stub articles