Wave breaking and the generation of undular bores in an integrable shallow-water system

The generation of an undular bore in the vicinity of a wave-breaking point is considered for the integrable Kaup-Boussinesq shallow water system. In the framework of the Whitham modulation theory, an analytic solution of the Gurevich-Pitaevskii type of problem for a generic “cubic” breaking regime is obtained using a generalized hodograph transform, and a further reduction to a linear Euler-Poisson equation. The motion of the undular bore edges is investigated in detail.