Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society - Series B Vol. 40 Part 2 (1998) The effect of randomness on the stability of deep water surface gravity waves in the presence of a thin thermocline Sudebi Bhattacharyya Department of Mathematics Scottish Church College 1 & 3 Urquhart Square Calcutta-700006 India. and K. P. Das Department of Applied Mathematics University of Calcutta 92 Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road Calcutta-700009 India Abstract: The effect of randomness on the stability of deep water surface gravity waves in the presence of a thin thermocline is studied. A previously derived fourth order nonlinear evolution equation is used to find a spectral transport equation for a narrow band of surface gravity wave trains. This equation is used to study the stability of an initially homogeneous Lorentz shape of spectrum to small long wave-length perturbations for a range of spectral widths. The growth rate of the instability is found to decrease with the increase of spectral widths. It is found that the fourth order term in the evolution equation produces a decrease in the growth rate of the instability. There is stability if the spectral width exceeds a certain critical value. For a vanishing bandwidth the deterministic growth rate of the instability is recovered. Graphs have been plotted showing the variations of the growth rate of the instability against the wavenumber of the perturbation for some different values of spectral width, thermocline depth, angle of perturbation and wave steepness. PDF file size: 134K © Copyright 1998, Australian Mathematical Society