We show that periodic traveling waves with sufficiently small amplitudes of the Whitham equation, which incorporates the dispersion relation of surface water waves and the nonlinearity of the shallow water equations, are spectrally unstable to long-wavelengths perturbations if the wave number is greater than a critical value, bearing out the Benjamin-Feir instability of Stokes waves; they are spectrally stable to square integrable perturbations otherwise. The proof involves a spectral perturbation of the associated linearized operator with respect to the Floquet exponent and the small-amplitude parameter. We extend the result to related, nonlinear dispersive equations.

It is a matter of experience that nonlinear waves in dispersive media, propagating primarily in one direction, may appear periodic in small space and time scales, but their characteristicsamplitude, phase, wave number, etc. -slowly vary in large space and time scales. In the 1970's, Whitham developed an asymptotic (WKB) method to study the effects of small "modulations" on nonlinear periodic wave trains. Since then, there has been a great deal of work aiming at rigorously justifying the predictions from Whitham's formal theory. We discuss recent advances in the mathematical understanding of the dynamics, in particular, the instability of slowly modulated wave trains for nonlinear dispersive equations of KdV type.

Abstract. We study the stability and instability of periodic traveling waves for Korteweg-de Vries type equations with fractional dispersion and related, nonlinear dispersive equations. We show that a local constrained minimizer for a suitable variational problem is nonlinearly stable to period preserving perturbations, provided that the associated linearized operator enjoys a Jordan block structure. We then discuss when the linearized equation admits solutions exponentially growing in time.

Periodic traveling waves are numerically computed in a constant vorticity flow subject to the force of gravity. The Stokes wave problem is formulated via a conformal mapping as a nonlinear pseudodifferential equation, involving a periodic Hilbert transform for a strip, and solved by the Newton‐GMRES method. For strong positive vorticity, in the finite or infinite depth, overhanging profiles are found as the amplitude increases and tend to a touching wave, whose surface contacts itself at the trough line, enclosing an air bubble; numerical solutions become unphysical as the amplitude increases further and make a gap in the wave speed versus amplitude plane; another touching wave takes over and physical solutions follow along the fold in the wave speed versus amplitude plane until they ultimately tend to an extreme wave, which exhibits a corner at the crest. Touching waves connected to zero amplitude are found to approach the limiting Crapper wave as the strength of positive vorticity increases unboundedly, while touching waves connected to the extreme waves approach the rigid body rotation of a fluid disk.

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