Practical aspects of stochastic dynamic tidal modelling

Kalman filtering for stochastic dynamic tidal models, is a hyperbolic filtering problem. The questions of observability and stability of the filter as well as the effects of the finite difference approximation on the filter performance are studied. The degradation of the performance of the filter, in case an erroneous filter model is used, is investigated. In this paper we discuss these various practical aspects of the application of Kalman filtering for tidal flow identification problems. Filters are derived on the basis of the linear shallow water equations. Analytical methods are used to study the performance of the filters under a variety of circumstances.