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We investigate the long‐time properties of the two‐dimensional inviscid Boussinesq equations near a stably stratified Couette flow, for an initial Gevrey perturbation of size ε. Under the classical Miles‐Howard stability condition on the Richardson number, we prove that the system experiences a shear‐buoyancy instability: the density variation and velocity undergo an inviscid damping while the vorticity and density gradient grow as . The result holds at least until the natural, nonlinear timescale . Notice that the density behaves very differently from a passive scalar, as can be seen from the inviscid damping and slower gradient growth. The proof relies on several ingredients: (A) a suitable symmetrization that makes the linear terms amenable to energy methods and takes into account the classical Miles‐Howard spectral stability condition; (B) a variation of the Fourier time‐dependent energy method introduced for the inviscid, homogeneous Couette flow problem developed on a toy model adapted to the Boussinesq equations, that is, tracking the potential nonlinear echo chains in the symmetrized variables despite the vorticity growth.

We consider the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation (KSE) on the two-dimensional torus in the presence of advection by a given background shear flow. Under the assumption that the shear has a finite number of critical points and there are linearly growing modes only in the direction of the shear, we prove global existence of solutions with data in$$L^2$$$L^2$, using a bootstrap argument. The initial data can be taken arbitrarily large.