Recovery of a Time-Dependent Bottom Topography Function from the Shallow Water Equations via an Adjoint Approach

Abstract: We develop an adjoint approach for recovering the topographical function included in the source term of one-dimensional hyperbolic balance laws. We focus on a specific system, namely the shallow water equations, in an effort to recover the riverbed topography. The novelty of this work is the ability to robustly recover the bottom topography using only noisy boundary data from one measurement event and the inclusion of two regularization terms in the iterative update scheme. The adjoint scheme is determined from a linearization of the forward system and is used to compute the gradient of a cost function. The bottom topography function is recovered through an iterative process given by a three-operator splitting method which allows the feasibility to include two regularization terms. Numerous numerical tests demonstrate the robustness of the method regardless of the choice of initial guess and in the presence of discontinuities in the solution of the forward problem.