Analysis of random nonlinear water waves: the Stokes-Woodward technique

A generalization of the Woodward's theorem is applied to the case of random signals jointly modulated in amplitude and frequency. This yields the signal spectrum and a rather robust estimate of the bispectrum. Furthermore, higher order statistics that quantify the amount of energy in the signal due to nonlinearities, e.g., wave-wave interaction in the case of water waves, can be inferred. Considering laboratory wind generated water waves, comparisons between the presented generalization and more standard techniques allow to extract the spectral energy due to nonlinear wave-wave interactions. It is shown that our analysis extends the domain of standard spectral estimation techniques from narrow-band to broad-band processes.