Rogue internal waves in the ocean: Long wave model

Abstract.

Rogue waves can be categorized as unexpectedly large waves, which are temporally and spatially localized. They have recently received much attention in the water wave context, and also been found in nonlinear optical fibers. In this paper, we examine the issue of whether rogue internal waves can be found in the ocean. Because large-amplitude internal waves are commonly observed in the coastal ocean, and are often modeled by weakly nonlinear long wave equations of the Korteweg-de Vries type, we focus our attention on this shallow-water context. Specifically, we examine the occurrence of rogue waves in the Gardner equation, which is an extended version of the Korteweg-de Vries equation with quadratic and cubic nonlinearity, and is commonly used for the modelling of internal solitary waves in the ocean. Importantly, we choose that version of the Gardner equation for which the coefficient of the cubic nonlinear term and the coefficient of the linear dispersive term have the same sign, as this allows for modulational instability. From numerical simulations of the evolution of a modulated narrow-band initial wave field, we identify several scenarios where rogue waves occur.