Ocean bathymetry reconstruction from surface data using hydraulics theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hydraulics-based method to reconstruct ocean bathymetry from surface data, successfully applied to Mediterranean and Red Sea data with high accuracy, offering a new approach for ocean topography mapping.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel inversion technique based on open-channel hydraulics principles to accurately reconstruct ocean bathymetry from surface velocity and elevation data.

Findings

Reconstructed bathymetries of Mediterranean and Red Sea with ~90% accuracy.

Method effectively captures bottom topography signatures from surface data.

Achieved high-resolution bathymetry reconstruction using surface measurements.

Abstract

Here we propose a technique that successfully reconstructs ocean bathymetry from the free surface velocity and elevation data. This technique is based on the principles of open-channel hydraulics, according to which a sub-critical flow over a seamount creates a free surface dip. The proposed method recognizes that such free surface dip contains the signature of the bottom topography, hence inverts the free surface to reconstruct the topography accurately. We applied our inversion technique on re-analysis data, and reconstructed the Mediterranean and the Red sea bathymetries of $1/12\degree$ resolution with approximately $90$\% accuracy.