NEARSHORE DEPTH-INVERSION FROM LIDAR SCANNERS: CURRENT PROGRESS, LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES

Scanning terrestrial lidars can simultaneously measure beach topography and sea-surface elevations across the surf-zone at high resolution. These maps of sea-surface elevations can be used to extract wave properties, which can then be inverted for depth and combined with beach topography observations, offering an exciting avenue for quantifying the morphological changes of sandy beaches at various temporal scales. As water depth decreases in this nearshore region, non-linear amplitude dispersion effects become increasingly relevant to wave shape and propagation and such effects need to be accounted for when estimating depth from remotely-sensed wave dispersive properties. Martins et al. (2023) recently proposed a new non-linear (Boussinesq) depth-inversion method to estimate nearshore depths from dense maps of sea surface elevation measurements. Here, we present our preliminary efforts aimed at implementing this Boussinesq approach to multiple lidar datasets collected recently in the field at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s Field Research Facility (FRF) in Duck NC.