The phase lead of shear stress in shallow-water flow over a perturbed bottom

The analysis of flow over a slowly perturbed bottom (when perturbations have a typical length scale much larger than channel height) is often based on the shallow-water (or Saint-Venant) equations with the addition of a wall-friction term which is a local function of the mean velocity. By this choice, small sinusoidal disturbances of wall stress and mean velocity are bound to be in phase with each other. In contrast, studies of shorter-scale disturbances have long established that a phase lead develops between wall stress and mean velocity, with a crucial destabilizing effect on sediment transport along an erodible bed. The purpose of this paper is to calculate the wall-shear stress under large length-scale conditions and provide corrections to the Saint-Venant model.