Mass transport under standing waves over a sloping beach

This paper deals with the mass transport induced by sea waves propagating over asloping beach and fully reflected from a wall. It is shown that for moderate slopesthe classical recirculation cell structure holds for small Reynolds numbers only. Whenthe Reynolds number is large, the cells interact among themselves giving rise to themerging of the negative cells and the confinement of the positive ones near the bottom.Under such circumstances the fluid moves onshore near the bottom and offshore nearthe free surface. The seaward decrease of the vorticity produced at the bottom appearsto be the reason for the merging phenomenon.