Approximate equations for long water waves

In the first part of this paper the Hamiltonian theory of water waves is used to obtain some equations in local coordinates. These equations are approximations of the Boussinesq type. They are stable with respect to short wave perturbations, e.g. rounding off errors in digital computing. In the second part the relation of Boussinesq equations to Korteweg-de Vries and Benjamin-Bona-Mahony equations is investigated.