Determination of inverse depths using direct Boussinesq modeling

This paper presents a technique to reconstruct bathymetry using two snapsho ts of water surface elevations and velocities as data. A Boussinesq model i nitialized with the data from the first snapshot is used as the engine to c ompute wave evolution over test bathymetries, which are iterated until a be st fit is reached with the second snapshot. Phase speed difference in compu ted and measured data is used as the basis for updating bathymetry at each iteration. A novel technique is used to minimize the effect of mismatches b etween velocity and surface elevation, which could otherwise result in sign ificant errors in phase speed estimates. The inversion algorithm is found t o reconstruct bathymetries well for a variety of test cases. A particular s trength of the methodology is the ability to account consistently for stron g, unsteady currents while constructing the inverse bathymetry.