154 



— The local nature of the LFI method allows it to satisfy the nonlinear free 

 surface boundary conditions at low order by finding separate solutions in 

 each of a sequence of small windows in time. 



— The LFI method provides an accurate two dimensional description of the 

 kinematics of irregular seas measured by a single water surface gauge or 

 subsurface pressure gauge. 



— The LFI method provides an accurate three dimensional description of the 

 kinematics of irregular seas measured by arrays of water surface gauges or 

 arrays of subsurface pressure gauges, including the bimodal seas resulting 

 from reflection from a vertical surface, such as a sea-wall or breakwater. 



— When working with subsurface pressure records, the LFI method is limited 

 in its capability to capture the high frequency components of the sea state 

 that decay rapidly with depth. 



— In order to accurately capture the detail of the measured records, the LFI 

 method requires very accurate data, with high sampling rates. 



— The LFI method can be adapted to virtually any arrangement of wave 

 measuring instruments. 



— The LFI method required substantial, but not prohibitive, computational 

 resoiirces. 



7.1 Future Work 



The results presented indicate the promise of the LFI method, and local methods 

 in general. There is still much work to be done before the method could be considered 

 usable as a "black box" code. 



Much of this work revolves around determining the numerical details of the nonlin- 

 ear optimization. While the presented results provide some guidelines to determining 

 appropriate parameters, considerable judgment and experimentation with any given 

 record is required. In the future, it may be possible to establish criteria for defining 

 the following numerical solution parameters: 



