The general features of oscillations within a rectangular harbor of exponential bottom are investigated analytically. Based on the linear shallow water approximation, analytical solutions for longitudinal oscillations induced by the incident perpendicular wave are obtained by the method of matched asymptotics. The analytic results show that the resonant frequencies are shifted to larger values as the water depth increases and the oscillation amplitudes are enhanced due to the shoaling effect. Owing to the refraction effect, there could be several transverse oscillation modes existing in when the width of the harbor is on the order of the oscillation wavelength. These transverse oscillations are similar to standing edge waves, and there are m node lines in the longshore direction and n node lines running in the offshore direction corresponding to mode（n, m）. Furthermore, the transverse eigen frequency is not only related to the width of the harbor, but also to the boundary condition at the backwall and the bottom shape.
It is demonstrated that offshore wavenumbers of edge waves change from imaginary wavenumbers in deep water to real wavenumbers in shallow water. This finding indicates that edge waves in the offshore direction exist as evanescent waves in deep water and as propagating waves in shallow water. Since evanescent waves can stably exist in a limited region while propagating waves cannot, energy should be released from nearshore regions. In the present study, the instability region is predicted based on both the full water wave solution and the shallow-water wave approximation.
