Field observation of soliton gases in the deep open ocean

Abstract

Soliton gases are large ensembles of random solitons with distinct characteristics arising from integrable system dynamics. They have been widely studied in theory and experiments, and were observed in natural lagoons. However, it remains an open question whether they occur naturally in the open ocean. Nonlinear ocean states containing solitons have been observed in the literature, but the dominance of solitons over other wave components required for a soliton gas has not been demonstrated. Our study provides the first field evidence of soliton gas sea states in the deep ocean, measured in Taiwan waters. The soliton energy ratio derived from the nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT) is used as a key parameter to quantify how close sea states are to soliton gases. We identify eleven measurements with extremely high soliton energy ratios. They are characterized by short-period waves with relatively small wave heights, accompanied by extreme steepness and Benjamin–Feir Index (BFI) values. These states are exceptionally rare, representing only 0.054% of our dataset. Since directional interference can artificially increase the estimated soliton energy ratio obtained from measured time series, we further apply a probabilistic directional filtering method to remove the directional interference. Three wave records from the Eluanbi station are found to retain high soliton energy ratios after the directional interference has been removed, confirming that they are indeed soliton gases.