The Bathymetry

Having gotten all of the data in the right format it is time to try to create a bathymetry of the lake with it.

When I first got started on it my comuter system was rather limited in processing all of the data. It was too memory intensive and took a long time to complete a solution. A lot of trial and error was involvd in the early stages in order to get a meaningingfull display of a bathymetric map.

Because of the size of the like, it was then thought to be more appropiate to focus on small areas of the lake. Hence the concept of cove maps came about. A small area of the like was identified and all of the water depth measurements made in that area became the focus of a bathymetric map. This turned out to be a good decision, because one could render in quite detail what the water depths were in the cove which could better be used to identify water under boatslips given a lake level, something people on the Southern end of the lake were particulalry interested in. The Southern end of the lake is generally prettty shallow.

The data is scattered data, not placed on a regular grid. A regular grid is necessary in order to connect points of equal value to create a contour.

A regular grid is populated with data by interpolating the existing scattered dataset.

Many methods of interpolation have been developed to address specific problems requiring data on a regular grid.

This aspect of interpolation is addressed in a separate note on this website.

Suffice to know is that I seek a method that’s already implemented in R.