High-Frequency Instabilities of a Boussinesq-Whitham System: A Perturbative Approach

Abstract: We analyze the spectral stability of small-amplitude, periodic, traveling-wave solutions of a Boussinesq-Whitham system. These solutions are shown numerically to exhibit high-frequency instabilities when subject to bounded perturbations on the real line. We use a formal perturbation method to estimate the asymptotic behavior of these instabilities in the small-amplitude regime. We compare these asymptotic results with direct numerical computations. This is the second paper in a series of three that investigates high-frequency instabilities of Stokes waves.