In this article, we develop the local Cauchy theory for the gravity water waves system, for rough initial data which do not decay at infinity. We work in the context of $L^2$-based uniformly local Sobolev spaces introduced by Kato. We prove a classical well-posedness result (without loss of derivatives). Our result implies also a local well-posedness result in H\"older spaces (with loss of $d/2$ derivatives). As an illustration, we solve a question raised by Boussinesq on the water waves problem in a canal. We take benefit of an elementary observation to show that the strategy suggested by Boussinesq does indeed apply to this setting.
Categories: math.AP