This paper is concerned with propagation of water waves induced by moving bodies with uniform velocity on the bottom of a channel, a simple model for prescribed underwater landslides. The fluid is assumed to be inviscid and incompressible, and the flow, irrotational. We apply this model
to a variety of test problems, and particular attention is paid to long-time dynamics of waves induced by two landslide bodies moving with the same speed. We focus on the transcritical regime where the linear theory fails to depict the wave phenomena even in the qualitative sense since it predicts an infinite growth in amplitude. In order to resolve this problem, weakly nonlinear theory or direct numerical simulations for the fully nonlinear equations is required. Comparing results of the linear full-dispersion theory, the linear shallow water equations, the forced Korteweg-de Vries model, and the full Euler equations, we show that water waves generated by prescribed underwater landslides are characterized by the Froude number, sizes of landslide bodies and distance between them. Particularly, in the transcritical regime, the second body plays a key role in controlling the criticality for equal landslide bodies, while for unequal body heights, the higher one controls the criticality. The results obtained in the current paper complement numerical studies based on the forced Korteweg-de Vries equation and the nonlinear shallow water equations by Grimshaw and Maleewong (J. Fluid Mech. 2015, 2016).