Paper_WaveDissipation

The repository Paper_WaveDissipation has code to analyze data and generate figures for the science paper "Observations of Wave Energy Dissipation by Bottom Friction on Rocky Shores" (Marques et al. 2025), accepted for publication in the Journal of Physical Oceanography (JPO).

The data are archived in this Zenodo repository (Marques et al. 2025).

In this paper, we analyzed measurements collected on rocky shores of the Monterey Peninsula as part of the ROXSI (ROcky shores: eXperiments and SImulations) 2022 experiment. In particular, we observed significant dissipation of sea-swell waves outside of the surfzone, which indicates large wave dissipation by bottom friction. The dissipation observed between pairs of instruments provides estimates of the wave friction factor $f_e$. The observed $f_e$ typically varies between 1 and 10, and are amongst the largest friction factors observed in environments with rough seabeds, including coral reefs and rocky shores.

At the top directory level, this GitHub repository has:

• paper_directory.m: a function that returns the paper directory path.
• run_reproducepaper.m: a high-level script to run all code for processing the data and making figures.
• proc/: a directory with Matlab code to process data.
• figures/: a directory with Matlab code to generate the figures.

To reproduce the paper, save the data repository (i.e., a folder named data) in the same level as the content in the Paper_WaveDissipation GitHub repository. To fully reproduce the figures, you must also have two additional toolboxes:

• m_map to make a map in Fig. 1.
• cmocean for a few colormaps.

For using the repository, first edit the directory path in paper_directory.m so that it provides the paper repository path in your machine. After editing paper_directory.m, you may run the full analysis with the high-level script run_reproducepaper.m. This script runs other scripts to (a) process bathymetry data, (b) process data from in-situ instruments, and (c) make figures in the paper.