Subaerial and underwater landslides, rock falls and glacier calvings can generate impulse waves in lakes, fjords and the open sea. Experiments with subaerial landslides have shown that, depending on the slide characteristics, different wave types (Stokes, cnoidal or bore-like waves) are generated. Each of these wave types shows different wave height decay with increasing distance from the impact position. Furthermore, in very shallow water, the first impulse wave shows characteristic properties of a solitary wave. The nonlinear Fourier transform based on the Korteweg–deVries equation (KdV-NLFT) is a frequency-domain analysis method that decomposes shallow-water free-surface data into nonlinear cnoidal waves instead of linear sinusoidal waves. This method explicitly identifies solitons as spectral components within the given data. In this study, we apply the KdV-NLFT for the very first time to available 2D and 3D landslide-test data. The objective of the nonlinear decomposition is to identify the hidden nonlinear spectral structure of the impulse waves, including solitons. Furthermore, we analyze the determined solitons at different downstream positions from the impact point with respect to soliton propagation and modification. Finally, we draw conclusions for the prediction of the expected landslide-generated downstream solitons in the far-field.
Scale effects in subaerial landslide generated impulse waves
