Reconstruction of river bed topography from free surface data using a direct numerical approach in one-dimensional shallow water flow

Abstract

River bed topography is of paramount importance for the study of fluvial hydraulics, flood prediction and river flow monitoring. It is therefore important to develop fast, easy-to-implement and cost-effective methods to determine underwater river topography. This paper presents a new one-step approach for reconstructing the river bed topography from known free surface data. This problem corresponds to the inverse of the classical hydrodynamic problem where the shallow water equations provide the free surface profile for a given river bed. We show in this work that instead of treating this inverse problem in the traditional partial differential equation (PDE)-constrained optimization framework, we can conveniently rearrange the governing equations for the direct problem to obtain an explicit PDE for the inverse problem. This leads to a direct solution of the inverse problem. An interesting consequence of the analysis is that the equations governing the forward and inverse problems have a very similar form, and the same discretization technique, based on an upwind conservative numerical scheme, can be used. The proposed methodology is successfully tested on a range of benchmark problems for noisy and noiseless free surface data. It was found that this solution approach creates very little amplification of noise.