The modulational instability of two-dimensional nonlinear traveling-wave solutions of the Whitham equation in the presence of constant vorticity is considered. It is shown that vorticity has a significant effect on the growth rate of the perturbations and on the range of unstable wavenumbers. Waves with kh greater than a critical value, where k is the wavenumber of the solution and h is the fluid depth, are modulationally unstable. This critical value decreases as the vorticity increases. Additionally, it is found that waves with large enough amplitude are always unstable, regardless of wavelength, fluid depth, and strength of vorticity. Furthermore, these new results are in qualitative agreement with those obtained by considering fully nonlinear solutions of the water-wave equations.

Bi-periodic patterns of waves that propagate in the x direction with amplitude variation in the y direction are generated in a laboratory. The amplitude variation in the y direction is studied within the framework of the vector (vNLSE) and scalar (sNLSE) nonlinear Schrödinger equations using the uniform-amplitude, Stokes-like solution of the vNLSE and the Jacobi elliptic sine function solution of the sNLSE. The wavetrains are generated using the Stokes-like solution of vNLSE; however, a comparison of both predictions shows that while they both do a reasonably good job of predicting the observed amplitude variation in y, the comparison with the elliptic function solution of the sNLSE has significantly less error. Additionally, for agreement with the vNLSE solution, a third harmonic in y term from a Stokes-type expansion of interacting, symmetric wavetrains must be included. There is no evidence of instability growth in the x-direction, consistent with the work of Segur and colleagues, who showed that dissipation stabilizes the modulational instability. There is some extra amplitude variation in y, which is examined via a qualitative stability calculation that allows symmetry breaking in that direction.We dedicate this paper to our friend and colleague, Harvey Segur.