A number of years ago, whilst I was still working at ENSIS, the consultancy arm of the ECRC at UCL, I worked on a project for the (then) Countryside Council for Wales (CCW; now part of Natural Resources Wales). I don’t recall why they were doing this project, but we were tasked with producing a standardised set of bathymetric maps for Welsh lakes. The brief called for the bathymetries to be provided in standard GIS formats. Either CCW’s project manager or the project lead at ENSIS had proposed to use inverse distance weighting (IWD) to smooth the point bathymetric measurements. This probably stemmed from the person that initiatied our bathymetric programme at ENSIS being a GIS wizard, schooled in the ways of ArcGIS. My involvement was mainly data processing of the IDW results. I was however, at the time, also somewhat familiar with the problem of finite area smoothing and had read a paper of Simon Wood’s on his then new soap-film smoother (Wood, Bravington, and Hedley 2008). So, as well as writing scripts to process and present the IDW-based bathymetry data in the report, I snuck a task into the work programme that allowed me to investigate using soap-film smoothers for modelling lake bathymetric data. The timing was never great to write up this method (two children and a move to Canada have occurred since the end of this project), so I’ve not done anything with the idea. Until now…
In this post, I want to introduce the concept of finite area smoothing and illustrate the use of soap-film smoothers in modelling lake bathymetric data.
Finite area smoothing
Often, we seek to model a response over a well-defined region with a known boundary. This problem is known as finite area smoothing, or as Ramsay put it, smoothing over difficult regions <span …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com