Swell and wind waves

Sometimes waves are very regular and mostly of the same length. Those are the ones that I usually talk about when I talk about interference of waves. But of course, other times, there are different kinds of waves with different histories and different lengths, and those do interfere, too. For example in the picture below, there are long swell waves caused by a distant storm, and then small wind waves on top of those, caused by a local breeze.

img_7264

The really long swell you can’t even see in the picture, because waves with a couple hundred meters wavelength and just a dozen or so centimeters height are just really hard to photograph… But you get the idea!

Leave a Reply