  Data assimilation has been applied to coastal hydrodynamic models to better
estimate system states or parameters by incorporating observed data into the
model. Kalman Filter (KF) is one of the most studied data assimilation methods
whose application is limited to linear systems. For nonlinear systems such as
hydrodynamic models a variation of the KF called Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF)
is applied to update the system state in the context of Monte Carlo simulation.
In this research, a dual EnKF approach is used to simultaneously estimate state
(water surface elevation) and parameters (bottom roughness and bathymetry) of
the shallow water models. The sensitivity of the filter to 1) the quantity and
precision of the observations, and 2) the initial estimation of parameters is
investigated in a 1-D shallow water problem located in the Gulf of Mexico.
Results show that starting from an initial estimate of bottom roughness and
bathymetry within a logical range and utilizing observations available at a
limited number of gages the dual EnKF is able to improve the bottom roughness
and bathymetry fields. The performance of the filter is sensitive to the
precision of measured data, especially in the case of estimating Mannings n and
bathymetry simultaneously.
