Abstract. In recent years two nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations have attracted a lot of attention due to their integrable structure. We prove that both equations arise in the modeling of the propagation of shallow water waves over a flat bed. The equations capture stronger nonlinear effects than the classical nonlinear dispersive Benjamin-Bona-Mahoney and Korteweg-de Vries equations. In particular, they accomodate wave breaking phenomena.

We prove that the water-waves equations (i.e., the inviscid Euler equations with free surface) are well-posed locally in time in Sobolev spaces for a fluid layer of finite depth, either in dimension 2 2 or 3 3 under a stability condition on the linearized equations. This condition appears naturally as the Lévy condition one has to impose on these nonstricly hyperbolic equations to insure well-posedness; it coincides with the generalized Taylor criterion exhibited in earlier works. Similarly to what happens in infinite depth, we show that this condition always holds for flat bottoms. For uneven bottoms, we prove that it is satisfied provided that a smallness condition on the second fundamental form of the bottom surface evaluated on the initial velocity field is satisfied. We work here with a formulation of the water-waves equations in terms of the velocity potential at the free surface and of the elevation of the free surface, and in Eulerian variables. This formulation involves a Dirichlet-Neumann operator which we study in detail: sharp tame estimates, symbol, commutators and shape derivatives. This allows us to give a tame estimate on the linearized water-waves equations and to conclude with a Nash-Moser iterative scheme.