Modulational Instability and Rogue Waves in Shallow Water Models

Abstract

It is now well known that the focussing nonlinear Schrodinger equation allows plane waves to be modulationally unstable, and at the same time supports breather solutions which are often invoked as models for rogue waves. This suggests a direct connection between modulation instability and the existence of rogue waves. In this chapter we review this connection for a suite of long wave models, such as the Korteweg-de Vries equation, the extended Korteweg-de Vries (Gardner) equation, often used to describe surface and internal waves in shallow water, a Boussinesq equation and, also a coupled set of Korteweg-de Vries equations.