Initial surface disturbance on a shear current: the Cauchy--Poisson problem with a twist

Abstract: We solve for the first time the classical linear Cauchy--Poisson problem for the time evolution an initial surface disturbance when a uniform shear current is present beneath the surface. The solution is general, including the effects of gravity, surface tension and constant finite depth. The particular case of an initially Gaussian disturbance of width $b$ is studied for different values of three system parameters: a "shear Froude number" $S\sqrt{b/g}$ ($S$ is the uniform vorticity), the Bond number and the depth relative to the initial perturbation width. Different phase and group velocity in different directions yield very different wave patterns in different parameter regimes when the shear is strong, and the well known pattern of diverging ring waves in the absence of shear can take on very different qualitative behaviours. For a given shear Froude number, both finite depth and nonzero capillary effects are found to weaken the influence of the shear on the resulting wave pattern. The various patterns are analysed and explained in light of the shear-modified dispersion relation.