| Summary: | Ocean wave breaking is a difficult-to-model oceanographic process, which has implications for
extreme wave statistics, the dissipation of wave energy, and air-sea interaction. Numerical methods capable
of reliably simulating real-world directionally spread breaking waves are useful for investigating the physics
of wave breaking and for the design of offshore structures and floating bodies. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is capable of modelling highly steep and overturning free surfaces, which makes it a promising
method for simulating breaking waves. This paper investigates the effect of smoothing length on simulated
wave breaking in both following and crossing seas. To do so, we reproduce numerically the experiments of
highly directionally spread breaking waves in McAllister et al. [J. Fluid Mech. vol. 860, 2019, pp. 767–786]
using a range of normalised smoothing lengths: h/dp =1.4, 1.7, 2.0, 2.3, with h smoothing length and
dp particle spacing. The smallest smoothing length we use appears to adversely affect the fidelity of the
simulated surface elevation, so that the tallest wave crest observed in experiments is not fully reproduced
(coefficient of determination r
2 ≈ 0.7). For smoothing lengths h/dp = 1.7, 2.0, and 2.3, the experiments are
well reproduced (r
2 ≥ 0.88); in these simulations smoothing length predominantly affects the spatial extent and duration of breaking. Qualitative and quantitative comparison of our simulations show that values of
h/dp in the range 1.7 − 2 best reproduce the wave breaking phenomena observed in experiments.
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