  We establish the existence of smooth vacuum Gowdy solutions, which are
asymptotically velocity term dominated (AVTD) and have T3-spatial topology, in
an infinite dimensional family of generalized wave gauges. These results show
that the AVTD property, which is known to hold for solutions in areal
coordinates, is stable to perturbations with respect to the gauge source
functions. Our proof is based on an analysis of the singular initial value
problem for the Einstein vacuum equations in the generalized wave gauge
formalism, and provides a framework which we anticipate to be useful for more
general spacetimes.
