Optimal reconstruction of water-waves from noisy pressure measurements at the seabed

We consider the problem of recovering the surface wave profile from noisy bottom pressure measurements with (a priori unknown) arbitrary pressure at the surface. Without noise, the direct approach developed in Clamond and Labarbe (2023) provides an effective way to recover the sea surface. However, the assumption of analyticity for the measured pressure renders this method inefficient in the presence of noise. In order to address this issue, we introduce here an optimisation procedure based on the minimisation of a distance between a recovered bottom pressure and its measurement. Such method proves to be well-designed to handle perturbed signals. We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach in the recovery of gravity-capillary waves from unfiltered noisy data. •We compare two methods to reconstruct water waves from pressure data.•The analytical approach is fast but is too sensitive to noise.•An approach based on an error minimisation is used for the first time.•This optimisation procedure is more resilient to noise but runs slowly.