2023/03/24 by Agissilaos Athanassoulis, Athanassoulis, Agissilaos G., Irene Kyza +1 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Analysis of PDEs (math.AP) #FOS: Mathematics #Ocean Waves and Remote Sensing #Oceanographic and Atmospheric Processes #Underwater Acoustics Research
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.13942
openalex publication_date 2023/03/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The nonlinear Schrödinger equation is widely used as an approximate model for the evolution in time of the water wave envelope. In the context of simulating ocean waves, initial conditions are typically generated from a measured power spectrum using the random phase approximation, and periodized on an interval of length L. It is known that most realistic ocean waves power spectra do not exhibit modulation instability, but the most severe ones do; it is thus a natural question to ask whether the periodized random phase approximation has the correct stability properties. In this work we specify a random phase approximation scaling so that, in the limit of L→∞, the stability properties of the periodized problem are identical to those of the continuous power spectrum on the infinite line. Moreover, it is seen through concrete examples that using a too short computational domain can completely suppress the modulation instability.