Comparison of modulational instabilities in full-dispersion shallow water models

Abstract

We study the modulational instability of a shallow water model, with and without surface tension, which generalizes the Whitham equation to include bi-directional propagation. Without surface tension, the small amplitude periodic traveling waves are modulationally unstable if their wave number is greater than a critical wave number predicting a Benjamin-Feir type instability and the result qualitatively agrees with the shallow water model in [HP16]. With surface tension, the result qualitatively agrees with the physical problem except for the large surface tension limit which is accurately predicted by the shallow water model in [HP16]. We also compare the results with the Whitham and full-dispersion Camassa-Holm equations.