EXCITATION OF WAVES INSIDE A BOTTOMLESS HARBOR

In planning enclosed areas in the ocean, such as offshore harbors for fishing or recreational boats, one has to consider very carefully the problem of forced seiches due to surface water waves. A number of papers have been written on this problem> but to the authors' knowledge, only one of them has treated the case of an artificial bottomless circular harbor in the open ocean, for which the walls extend only part way to the sea floor. A bottom to such a harbor, which would be expensive, can only be omitted if the effect of its absence on the sea surface inside the harbor is not overly detrimental. C.J.R. Garrett (1970) made a theoretical study of the excitation of waves inside such a harbor for the 'no-entrance' case. The object of this caper is to evaluate experimentally the behavior of the sea surface inside such a harbor, to compare the results with the theoretical values obtained by Garrett, and to extend the observations to the case for which there is an entrance to the harbor.