Water waves in shallow channels of rapidly varying depth

Abstract

We analyse the linear water-wave equations for shallow channels with arbitrary rapidly varying bottoms. We develop a theory for reflected waves based on an asymptotic analysis for stochastic differential equations when both the horizontal and vertical scales of the bottom variations are comparable to the depth but small compared to a typical wavelength so the shallow water equations cannot be used. We use the full, linear potential theory and study the reflection–transmission problem for time-harmonic (monochromatic) and pulse-shaped disturbances. For the monochromatic waves we give a formula for the expected value of the transmission coefficient which depends on depth and on the spectral density of the O(1) random depth perturbations. For the pulse problem we give an explicit formula for the correlation function of the reflection process. We compare our theory with numerical results produced using the boundary-element method. We consider several realizations of the bottom profile, let a Gaussian-shaped disturbance propagate over each topography sampled and record the reflected signal for each realization. Our numerical experiments produced reflected waves whose statistics are in good agreement with the theory.