NONLINEAR MODULATION OF RANDOM WAVE SPECTRA FOR SURFACE-GRAVITY WAVES WITH LINEAR SHEAR CURRENTS

Abstract We first derive Alber’s equation for the Wigner distribution function using the fourth-order nonlinear Schrödinger equation, and on the basis of this equation we next analyse the stability of the narrowband approximation of the Joint North Sea Wave Project spectrum. Therefore, one interesting result of this study concerns the effect of modulational instability obtained from the fourth-order nonlinear Schrödinger equation. The analysis is restricted to one horizontal direction, parallel to the direction of wave motion, to take advantage of potential flow theory. We find that shear currents considerably modify the instability behaviours of weakly nonlinear waves. The key point of this study is that the present fourth-order analysis shows considerable deviations in the modulational instability properties from the third-order analysis and reduces the growth rate of instability. Moreover, we present here a connection between the random and deterministic properties of a random wavetrain for vanishing spectrum bandwidth.