Inverse 3D shallow water flow modelling of the continental shelf

The adjoint method has been derived and implemented for solving inverse 3D shallow water flow modelling problems. Attention is concentrated on estimating the harmonic constants in the open boundary conditions, the space varying friction parameter, the space varying viscosity parameter and the depth values in a 3D shallow sea model of the entire European Continental Shelf. Here the estimation problem is formulated as a large-scale optimization problem that is solved with a gradient-based optimization method. The gradient is determined efficiently by using the solution of the adjoint problem.