A mathematical analysis of the Kakinuma model for interfacial gravity waves. Part II: justification as a shallow water approximation

We consider the Kakinuma model for the motion of interfacial gravity waves. The Kakinuma model is a system of Euler–Lagrange equations for an approximate Lagrangian, which is obtained by approximating the velocity potentials in the Lagrangian of the full model. Structures of the Kakinuma model and the well-posedness of its initial value problem were analysed in the companion paper [14]. In this present paper, we show that the Kakinuma model is a higher order shallow water approximation to the full model for interfacial gravity waves with an error of order $O(\delta _1^{4N+2}+\delta _2^{4N+2})$ in the sense of consistency, where $\delta _1$ and $\delta _2$ are shallowness parameters, which are the ratios of the mean depths of the upper and the lower layers to the typical horizontal wavelength, respectively, and $N$ is, roughly speaking, the size of the Kakinuma model and can be taken an arbitrarily large number. Moreover, under a hypothesis of the existence of the solution to the full model with a uniform bound, a rigorous justification of the Kakinuma model is proved by giving an error estimate between the solution to the Kakinuma model and that of the full model. An error estimate between the Hamiltonian of the Kakinuma model and that of the full model is also provided.