Wave Packet Defocusing Due to a Highly Disordered Bathymetry

Slowly modulated water waves are considered in the presence of a strongly disordered bathymetry. Previous work is extended to the case where the random bottom irregularities are not smooth and are allowed to be of large amplitude. Through the combination of a conformal mapping and a multiple‐scales asymptotic analysis it is shown that large variations of a disordered bathymetry can affect the nonlinearity coefficient of the resulting damped nonlinear Schrödinger equations. In particular it is shown that as the bathymetry fluctuation level increases the critical point (separating the focusing from the defocusing region) moves to the right, hence enlarging the region where the dynamics is of a defocusing character.