Sharing our experience using wave theories inversion for the determination of the local depth

The determination of the nearshore bathymetry by inverting the propagation of the wave field over shallow waters as observed by ground based X-band radar has became recently part of the coastal monitoring routing. In this investigation, four different wave theories, linear, solitary, modified cnoidal and Stokes extended to shallow waters, are inverted by using the Dispersive Surface Classificator, DiSC, methodology. This is the first time that the efficiency of the previously mentioned theories for the determination of the depth is validated with multibeam echosounder data acquired two days before the radar data acquisition. The performance of the four wave models for the extraction of the local depth is discussed. The resulted bathymetries in all cases are significant, but the sources of the error are different.